22 Comments

I spent a few months in Cambodia years back. What "politics" did to the country is chilling. You can see it merely by riding a motorbike from the relatively well developed Thailand into the barrenness of the Cambodian hinterland beyond Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. You don't need to visit the killing fields were 1.3 million bodies lay. You can see it by what's not there, the lives not lived, or lived so quietly so as to not disturb the man with the AK-47 that they were like ghosts on the landscape.

The cullings so destroyed anyone with initiative (or those who dared to voice it) that it set the country back generations.

What's so bizarre to me is how quickly people forget. I was alive when communism collapsed, but my generation sometimes talks about its tenants with an almost wistful air.

I always have to keep my temper in check. They're all playing with fire.

This was a great piece.

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That is fortunate you got to see Cambodia. Your point about forgetfulness is spot on, and there is no excuse. When they play with fire, it is all of our houses that risk going up in flames. Thanks, Andrew

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Very timely post. I feel that the time of choosing is coming for the Fourth Turning. We are not only faced with a Marxist agenda that you described but also with anarchy (destroy all first) as strategy of the globalists.

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"The time of choosing." I think you are right, and it actually worries me because most of the people who are choosing have no idea just how terrible things can become. A trip to the third world or modern day utopia would, I think, lead to a sense of gratitude for what we have.

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I believe the 4th Turning has already occurred. The USA is now the 4th Reich and it is leading the West into a final battle against Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and Ukraine. Mindless Westerners believe they can now change their sex with surgery, hormones, and therapy. There has never been a society so desperate to be destroyed and forgotten.

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Oh, we will be remembered. But for what?

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It is interesting that the Bible never mentions what Sodom and Gomorrah were like before perversion became all the rage. The USA will not be remembered for George Washington or Lincoln. We will be remembered as simply another degenerate society that became too evil to exist.

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Russia and Ukraine on the same side? Seems unlikely.

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Ukraine was part of Russia for nearly seventy years. It was not until the CIA installed a gangster government that tensions grew between the two nations. Most Ukrainians speak Russian and were not part of the Color Revolution paid for by American taxpayers.

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Great piece, thanks

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You're welcome, Kurt. Thanks for reading.

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"The Khmer Rouge would say that the authorities have “as many eyes as a pineapple.” Is this it then? Is this the chosen image of the intellectual regime that murdered a quarter of its own population? A pineapple?"

"I've been working on a piece about the weird dichotomy that observation makes us better people individually but also often erodes societies for this exact reason. There will always be tyrants who turn their surveillance against those being watched."

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This is fascinating and I need to think on it far more deeply. Stoked for your piece.

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The more I know of history, the more I see that universities are the breeding ground of radicalism. Sometimes the results are good, sometimes they are hideous. Right now, it's hideous.

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Very much so. The irony is that it is so easy to fix it. History in some of these regimes seems to indicate that we always have to wait until it is too late. The "why" behind that is a study all its own.

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It is not for nothing that the term 'sheeple' has been coined. Some people crave totalitarianism. Some people become anxious about choices. They want everything to be linear and defined.

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Ironic that you get to cite the Black Book of Terror published by … Harvard University Press. Would it publish that book now?

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An excellent question. Fortunately the past cannot be undone - or buried.

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Very important question about what the Stoics would say in this political moment. Fear is the enemy and its becoming more evident in the US (in some places more than others) that submission is the default for many people. My hope is that the diversity of views present across this country can lead to a middle path. Being ruled by fear is just as dangerous as fearlessness.

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100% Jesse. America has weathered worse storms and the solution is painfully easy. All we need to do is call it what it is.

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🎯 Excellent and provocative!

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Thank you Mark!

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