When I was 20, in 1968, the United States was at the beginning of the rapid decent into fascism we are now suffering in its full bloom. On a false pretext, a CIA-fabricated and inflated “attack” on US battleships by ground-based North Vietnamese forces, my country had escalated the illegal war and invasion of a third world country for a laundry list of amoral and awful reasons. We were moving from a country that was largely admired by the world for our participation in defeating Germany, Italy, and Japan’s fascism and representing democracy to the world, to becoming an outlaw nation that abused it’s military power for the profit of a few. We are, now, solidly that country. And I suspect there is no turning back.
Thanks to asthma, the Navy, Air Farce, Marines, and, finally, the US Army classified me as 1-Y, then 4-F, after I failed my Navy physical when I was 18, two years earlier. Before that, I didn’t know what asthma was, I just thought I was a wimp who coughed up blood after running a couple of 100 yard sprints in football practice. Supposedly, my father and step-mother knew, but I suppose they’d hoped I’d “grow out of it” and didn’t bother to explain any of my handicap to me. I did grow out of it, too, after leaving Kansas and the agricultural air pollution of the Midwest and moving to the cleaner, less polluted Los Angeles environment in the 1980s.
So, without the draft hanging over my head and a new wife to care for as a twenty-year-old without direction, other than protesting the Vietnam War, I was looking for a philosophy. One of the few over-40-adults with the courage to speak out against the Vietnam War was Bertrand Russell, who had the good sense and decency to be a British citizen. In his book, The Problems of Philosophy, Russell presented me with the background for a lifetime of skepticism. One of his many challenges was the thought that, to be an atheist (as opposed to the lazier agnostic I’d been up till then), I needed to explore all of the religions of the world and find them without meaning or utility. So, while my new wife was back in school finishing her senior year in high school, and after I’d finished my meter-reading route for the day, I spent my afternoons in the downtown Dallas, Texas library. That library is still one of the most amazing buildings I’ve ever experienced. Since there are at least 10,000 religions in the world, I didn’t come close to carefully examining all of them, but most (like Christianity) are so burdened with superstition, magic, violence, prejudice, and ridiculous bullshit that they didn’t warrant much more than a brief glance to expose their lack of value.
The two “religions” that I found the most fascinating and complex were Buddhism and Confucianism, both of which are only sort-of-religions and are more accurately described as philosophy. Like religions, both have been thoroughly distorted, perverted, and made into something they weren’t and shouldn’t by defective, vicious, corrupt, greedy humans. And that is when and where I first ran into the quote, “Choose your enemies wisely, for you will become them.” Everyone from Confucius to Friedrich Nietzsche to Mary Dora Russell gets credit for that warning, but regardless of the origin, it appears to be true.
What we take away from that fact is the place where
philosophy becomes downright terrifying.
Taken as an absolute fact, it appears that the worst people are the most
likely to benefit, long term, from choosing enemies, since evil will become
good, eventually, and good will become evil. The United States, today, seems to be a
perfect example of exactly that. Most
recently, US Vice-President J.D. Vance (or
whatever his name is at the moment) lectured what used to be our European
allies on his
perverted view of democracy, "You can believe it's wrong for Russia to
buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do, But if your democracy can be destroyed with a
few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country,
then it wasn't very strong to begin with." Ironic words from a man apparently incapable
of irony or any form of humor, since Russia bought his entire political party
for a few million dollars. Of course,
Vance was defending Germany’s far right political parties, supported and sustained
by Putin’s barely-disguised attempts to capture the EU in the same manner the US
Republican Party was co-opted.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius bit back with, “If I understood him [Vance] correctly, he is comparing conditions in parts of Europe with those in authoritarian regimes. That is unacceptable, and it is not the Europe and not the democracy in which I live and am currently campaigning.
“In our democracy, every opinion has a voice and it makes it possible for parties that are partly extremists such as the AfD, and they can campaign just as any other party, This is democracy.”
Germany, in 1941, chose democracy, peaceful and free nations as its enemy. At least the majority of Americans (including Canada and Mexico) chose fascism as its enemy. Today, Germany is defending democracy, peaceful and free nations, and its own national and regional security while the United States is opposing all those things, internally and world-wide. We, apparently, did not choose our enemies wisely.
