OPINION:
President Obama thinks that history will magically take out all the bad guys in the world. He repeatedly lectures us that bad actors — such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Muslim beheader of American journalists, and anyone else who is tanking his poll numbers are “on the wrong side of history.”
History doesn’t take sides, though, because it has no will of its own. History is a noun, not a verb, and it is unspooled day by day by men and women whose actions create events. Eventually, history is the record in words and pictures about those actions and events, often long after they have unfolded.
Yet in Obamaworld, history will save us because history is on our side. “One thing we can all agree on is that groups like [the Islamic State] have no place in the 21st century,” he intoned after momentarily changing from golf shorts into a suit to project sadness about the beheading of James Foley.
Does Mr. Obama simply not realize that tens of thousands in many nations do in fact believe that this terrorist group has every right to take over the world in, yes, the 21st century? “People like [the Islamic State] ultimately fail,” Mr. Obama continued. “They fail because the future is won by those who build and not destroy, and the world is shaped by people like Jim Foley, and the overwhelming majority of humanity who are appalled by those who killed him.”
But that sunny “future” didn’t prevail quickly enough for Jim Foley or the thousands of Christians, Jews and even Muslims the brutal Islamic State crew have already slaughtered.
History has a terrible sense of timing, and its chronic tardiness has spelled doom for millions. History was a few years too late to save about 11 million Jews, Christians, Gypsies and others who died horribly in Nazi death camps because Hitler considered them “inferior.”
Somebody should buy history a watch. History was also too late to save the estimated 100 million human souls who were murdered by their own godless communist governments in the USSR, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Mr. Obama should tell the thousands killed by Castro’s Cuban regime over the decades, and even now are tortured and imprisoned for speaking out against the regime not to worry — history is galloping to their rescue on its white horse. Just look out that prison window.
Though Pulitzer Prize winner and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer decided early on he didn’t want to pursue medicine, his psychiatric training has proved useful in his role as political observer, particularly in his assessment of the current occupant of the White House. Speaking at a recent Weekly Standard magazine event in Colorado, Mr. Krauthammer analyzed Mr. Obama’s insistence that the bad guys, be they Mr. Putin or the Islamist fascists, are on the wrong side of history as “simply idiotic.”
Mr. Krauthammer also observed that the president likes to quote Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it tends towards justice.” These words are meant to comfort us that no matter how terrible things get, the good guys will win in the end. Just how reassuring is that, asks Mr. Krauthammer, for the “three generations of Ukrainians consigned to live in dispossession and ruin” now that Mr. Putin has clawed Crimea into his Russian bear cave?
Mr. Krauthammer argues that the president’s smiley-face doctrine is glaringly contradicted by human events in which “democracy is a tiny flickering in human history that can go out in a day.” Even if Hitler did lose in the end, he took millions of innocent lives and smashed countries with him. He lost not because “history” defeated him, but because brave troops, many from the United States, died to defeat him.
“The president is leading in the present, not in some capital ’H’ version of history,” says Mr. Krauthammer, marveling that Mr. Obama actually told Mr. Putin that aggression isn’t in the Russian’s best interest: “Can you imagine Vlad on the other end of the phone snickering — this guy who’s a KGB thug with this president from the Harvard faculty lounge instructing him?”
Maybe history with a capital “H” has given Mr. Obama some secret guarantee that the bloodbath the terrorists promise us will “ultimately fail.” He doesn’t seem concerned that the lessons of the very history on which he stakes our nation’s future instructs that most great nations only last about 200 years and at year 238, America is overdue for a fall.
Does he even know that this history he so reveres teaches that from its birth in the early 7th century A.D., Islam spread across the Middle East, then Africa, then into Europe and Spain, not by peaceful conversion but by armies and bloody conquest or that the 14th-century Muslim ruler Tamerlane massacred hundreds of thousands of “infidels” and had towering pyramids built from the heads of his victims? Or did Mr. Obama spend too much time as a youth partying in the “choom bus” he describes in his biography, undisturbed by history’s indifference to his naivete?
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist and author.
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