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After the horrors of two World Wars, Europe has lost the will to defend itself. It isn’t even bothering to reproduce its own population. I think we are watching the inevitable decline of Europe. Germany was so stupid to let itself become dependant on Russian oil as it shut down its nuclear plants and virtue signaled with windmills. Now Americans are supposed to rush in and defend them when they won’t bother themselves? America could have been an energy supplier to Europe, but this old fool we have in the White House genuflects to the Greens and made that impossible. Biden’s weakness has emboldened the worst impulses of evil men. Shame on those who elected him.

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History will not look kindly on people like Levy. It is one thing to encourage people to stand up and throw off their chains for themselves. It is wholly another to provide moral cover for an empires disguising themselves as liberators.

Nobody seems to acknowledge that the Ukraine held free and fair elections and chose a government that was moderate towards Moscow. Then the West, led by the hubristic fools at the US State Department, overthrew that government in a coup using neo-Nazis street thugs as muscle.

If I were to describe those of Levy and Friedman's ilk, it would be willfully ignorant and arrogant. They advocate for policies that stroke their moral egos without regard for the destruction and despair they cause.

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I know how over-simplified this may sound, but with two million illegals flooding across our southern border just in 2021, (the number of potential terrorists amongst them unknown) and more flowing in daily, isn't it reasonable to think that the government's first priority is to this nation's borders, and perhaps less so to the Ukrainian border?

I'm not an isolationist, but WTF? Our border is a ruptured sieve. Troops? Howz about down south?

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I am not a geopolitical expert, so if what I'm about to write is ignorant and wrongheaded, let me have it:

"Until and unless we're willing to risk American blood and treasure defending our OWN border, I have no desire to risk American blood and treasure defending anyone ELSE's border."

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The problem with so-called "deep thinkers" like BHL is that their points-of-view sound enlightened and profound, but when measured against reality, are actually reductionist, even simplistic. Far from offering real solutions to these terrible problems here described, they offer "can't we all just get along?" Any examination of human history shows that is not the natural state of human beings. I don't happen to like it, but to pretend this isn't the reality makes it impossible to find solutions.

To bring up a straw man like the buffoonish Jean-Marie LePen as an illustration of the problem, while ignoring the Deep State in the U.S, and the unelected Borg of the EU does not show any kind of willingness to apply intellectual rigor to an examination of the problems plaguing the world in 2022

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founding

“I see an explosion of extreme misery; even more marked inequality in the face of the virus and the devastating effects of climate change”

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Those impacts were caused exclusively by government. I’m fine with $7 gas. Now go ask a poor person.

The global collectivist climate scam is part of what caused the situation in Ukraine. Germany stopped drilling and turned off their nukes and now their energy prices have skyrocketed and they are sending untold riches to Putin who owns them.

ESG will need to be eliminated. It is anticompetitive collusive behavior. Not to mention idiotic and patently corrupt.

Luckily, I think the imbecilic hysterical virus response will wake people up, globally, to the fact that these are the exact same people pushing utopian dipshit climate programs.

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A noble sentiment, but I would tell Mr. Levy that if he wants that kind of interventionism he can pay for it with the blood of his family rather than ask the same 5% of the American population who send their young to die. Where is the European wherewithal to defend itself? Or South Korea, for that matter? Why are we the de facto world police when our allies have the means to defend themselves (we can sell them weapons and training all day)?

Do we not have more pressing issues here at home? Our educational system is a joke; our infrastructure is crumbling and we are sliding further and further behind other industrialized nations competitively. How about we “intervene” and “nation build” here and encourage our European/Asian allies to find their huevos and start doing their part to defend the Western culture and values they enjoy.

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BHL seems to me to be like many other interventionists who seem happy to send the children of lower and lower middle class American families to fight for their cherished causes. Many of which, such as the "Arab Spring," ended up as fiascos; contrary to our nation's interest. Now he bangs the drum for intervention in Ukraine. Arm the Ukrainians? Well that's what Trump did and it worked. But then we had Trump at the helm and now we are a rudderless wreck with the execrable, senile Biden charting our course. Fight Russia, when ours lines would be dangerously extended and they would be fighting on familiar turf? When Milley and other clowns are destroying our combat effectiveness by purging real war fighters? Madness. Send your boys to fight if you want. Keep mine out of this.

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“I made this documentary to convince young people—in the United States in particular—of the nobility of this form of interventionism.”

More to the point, he wants yet another generation of American youth to become cannon fodder while he reads “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”

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Imagine our reaction if Russia put troops in Mexico, right on the border... Yet they say Russia is "agressive". Seems like rank hypocrisy to me. Call it what it is, we are wanting to cripple allies of China, but not China specifically because the American oligarchs have too much money to lose. Moreover, the shortages of everything from medicine to clothing would wreck our entire economy and kill thousands of Americans. We have some garbage leaders in this country.

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I am a Vietnam veteran, a retired civil engineer, and a voracious reader of history from Herodotus to the present. Believe me, the Middle East and Central Asia hasn't changed its social attitudes since the third Millennium BC. Read the chapter Hama Rules in Friedman's from Beirut to Jerusalem. He made the point, equally valid today, that the elder Assad's obliteration of the town of Hama in the 1970s was no different from the behavior of Sargon of Akkad in the third Millennium, and to expect otherwise is the height if naivete. The culture of the rural Afghanistan the US military entered in 2003 essentially was no different from the culture encountered by Alexander's Macedonians in the 4th century BC. Attempts to install western parliamentary democracy and culture in the area between the eastern shire of the Mediterranean and the Indus was doomed to failure from the start. We should have learned our lesson. The same applies to the situation in the Ukraine. Let the Russians and Ukrainians slaughter each other. They've been doing it regularly since the 12th century AD.

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"No human community is intended for bondage any more than any other. Nothing—no cultural tradition or anything else—justifies the stoning of women, their mutilation, or their exclusion from healthcare or education. And nothing, no form of relativism, can promise enlightenment to some and eternal darkness to others."

Does this man not see the arrogance and imperialism of this statement? To see what I mean, consider a hypothetical 16th century conquistador:

"No human is intended for damnation. Nothing — no cultural tradition or anything else — justifies [fill in the blank]. No form of heathenism can obtain salvation, it brings only eternal darkness."

Mr. Levy would undoubtedly condemn such a sentiment as (rightly) imperialistic, but doesn't recognize that he is making the same error. He trumpets immigration and multiculturalism but seeks uniformity in practice. The Catholic Church sought culture uniformity 500 years ago. Salafi Islamists want the same today. What he's advocating is theocracy under a new religion of global, secular, democratic liberalism; where dissent cannot be tolerated because it might be used to justify stoning of women.

"I am aware of that poll [that 99% of Afghans—men and women—desire to live under Sharia law]. When a woman in Kabul refers to Sharia, she is not advocating for the right to be stoned in the event of adultery."

What an Afghan woman is saying when she says "I want to be ruled by Sharia law" is a mystery to Mr. Levy, but he's certain it can't mean "I want to be ruled by Sharia law", because he knows (with a religious certainty) that Shariah law is evil. He laments that Nigerian Christians don't get to speak, but when Afghan Muslims do speak, their words be filtered through his ideology. Like wokeness, his is a religious conviction.

The truly liberal alternative is to put local traditions first, even when they conflict with your totalizing view of the world. After 20 years of top-down, secular, liberalism democracy imposed by America, if Afghans still say they want Islamic law, how is it liberal to refuse? Is it possible that Afghans know better what works in their society than the Western university professors we hired to remake it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdrvpSfJM1w. If you want to see why Afghanistan rejected Western liberalism, watch the woman in the back row at 0:32. When the alternative was urinals masquerading as art, why are we surprised they choose Islam? In Mr. Levy's ideology, if the vast majority of Afghan women don't want to be mini-skirt wearing, gender-queer, postmodernist, Western consumers... they must be made to want it! Because we know what's good for you better than you do! So wear the damn skirt, march in the pride parade, and shut up, you bigot.

Religious theocrats like Mr. Levy are the most dangerous. They will pave the way to a totalitarian hell, while smiling and telling you they're doing it for your own good. "Truth" must prevail! Local traditions, norms, and culture be damned.

Evil preaches tolerance until it gains power, then it crushes all dissent. Terrifying.

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About Ukraine - why is no one in the media talking about US and British guarantees to Yeltsin that Ukraine would never be considered for NATO membership? And the persistent NATO bomber flights off the Coast of Crimea? Seems to me we’re provoking Putin to shift attention away from our domestic disasters.

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I don't know that I agree with Mr. Lévy on everything, but I so appreciate the opportunity to hear a thoughtful, humane argument that has largely been abandoned in American discourse.

One part I can't dispute is the last paragraph. I teach American and European History, and I may post that quote on the wall of my classroom.

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"...a world without travel, a world where we closed ourselves off from others, would be an impoverished world. Spiritually, of course. Civilizationally, no doubt. But also, in the most trivial sense of the word, economically."

Many of us know that something must be done regarding Ukraine, but at the same time, Biden, Harris, Milley, Blinken and the rest of current U.S. leadership directing such an intervention is not only a terrifying prospect, but also a recipe for U.S. self-destruction.

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I'm not sure what 8500 troops could do in this situation. It's the height of elitist cynicism to use them as a tripwire. The invasion will happen or not based on things that were said and agreed to weeks, months and years ago.

Please don't send our young people to die for the European elite who refuse to die for this cause.

Our youngsters have carried the weight of European freedom for over a century. It's time for the Europeans to fight their own fights. It's time for the Western elites here and there to fight their own fights.

Why should the Ivy League, State Dept, folks get to fly home ahead of the slaughter caused, in part, by their schemes while our dear deplorables arrive feet first in Dover to a perfunctory reception made up of the corrupt cowards who sent them to their unnecessary deaths? No more. Shame on us if we allow this.

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