Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Like most human beings, we Americans love to dream the dream of being at peace. The sense of stability and safety that peacetime brings is a true blessing. It allows us to imagine that, at least for the moment, we are exempt from the Darwinian struggle for life and legacy that consumes most of creation.
While peace may equate to joy, it is not a state that has ever been either commonplace or easy to achieve. Children should be at peace because their parents sweat and sacrifice to provide for and protect them. A traditional housewife and mother might experience a form of peace because her husband exerts himself outside of the home to provide for all of the household’s needs.
In a nation that has law, order, trust, and common values, civilians can feel at peace because their lives, liberties, and property are under the protection of the military from foreign threats and the police from domestic threats.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
The United States, along with most of the English-speaking world, has for most of its history been constituted in such a way as to provide maximal peace for most of its people for the vast majority of the time. Traditionally, we who hold Anglo-Saxon values police our own words and actions sufficiently to avoid the need for meddlesome laws and intrusive gendarmes.
However, this high standard state of peacetime is a product exclusively of Judeo-Christian Western Civilization. As Europeans engaged in ongoing warfare with one another, they developed the systems of Embassies and of diplomacy which brought to their world the first long-term states of ongoing peace. War has since become a unique state of affairs, self-evidently different from peace, when all the restraints of civil life could be overridden in order to achieve victory over a deadly foe.
Human affairs cannot long exist under such conditions of anarchy and violence. Europeans took ideas of peace treaties from times long before Europe emerged as a unique society. As far back as Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II’s peace treaty with the Hittites after the Battle of Kadesh in 1259 BC, government have parlayed the end of hostilities with one another.
However, these early agreements only limited the scale of war to that of organized criminal activity. In the 1500s and 1600s, Europeans refined the rules that distinguished wartime from peacetime, and produced legal and orderly relations between nations that did not involve persistent cross-border crime and low-grade raiding and terror.
In doing so, European nations created among the world’s first genuine states of peace. Certainly after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the horrors of the Thirty Years War, Europeans lived in a binary world order of either peacetime or wartime.
This high order of peaceable relations unmarred by persistent low levels of international violence was never the norm outside of the Western world. In the Islamic Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia civilizations shared borders with savages. Barbarians never truly make peace; there was always kidnapping, rape, theft, and murder conducted on a tribal scale.
As non-Western societies came into routine contact, there tended to be levels of mutual interference that we in the West would consider to be acts of war. Understanding this is key to understanding the behavior of many of America’s foes on today’s world stage; particularly the Chinese Communist Party.
The last time that the West had to contend with a non-Christian and non-Western major power opponent, the Ottoman Turks were besieging Vienna in 1683 until Poland’s Winged Hussars arrived to send the Turks back to Constantinople. Before that, it was also the Ottomans trying to take Vienna in 1529, and before that it was the Mongol Empire beating the Hungarians at the
Battle of the Sajo River in 1241.
Americans, really Westerners around the world, are simply not used to dealing with opponents who do not follow Western norms. Even during both World Wars and the Cold War, our opponents instinctively recognized the differences between a state of peace and a state of open warfare. Certainly, the National Socialists and Soviet Communists did not always adhere to these distinctions, but they did understand when they were crossing such a line.
This is absolutely not true of America and the West’s enemies today. The Chinese Communist Party, and its catspaws in North Korea, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, just to name a few, accept no standard of peacetime restraint.
The Islamist terrorists in Beijing’s orbit have considered themselves to be at war with the United States since the US intervention to protect Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. So this also is with the Iranians and with Communist Revolutionaries across the world, including so-called Antifa Terrorists here in the United States.
The Chinese Communist Party is currently waging a low grade war with the United States. They are behind the mass-smuggling of fentanyl into the United States, have been caught building massive SIM farms here in order to blank out our electrical power and communications systems, and are funding every bad actor around the world. Their funds stream through groups all across the West which bring discord to levels that could result in Civil Wars. They are constantly attacking our internet networks.
China’s Communists are at war with us. That means, whether we recognize it or not, we are at war with them. Let us not repeat the mistaken dreams of peace of 12/06/1941 or 9/10/2001. Let us not follow the ostrich in stubbornly refusing to take our heads out of the sand and face this harsh reality. We are at war with the Chinese Communist Party. Let us not wait until they strike us with massive ordinance as they cross Taiwan Strait to acknowledge this!
