‘The Valor of Ignorance’

by Mike Vanderboegh with gratitude to Homer Lea

"The preceding chapters of this journal have been written to little purpose if it has not been made clear that Drew and I, like most pilots during the first weeks of service at the front, were worth little to the Allied cause. We were warned often enough that the road to efficiency in military aviation is a long and dangerous one. We were given much excellent advice by aviators who knew what they were talking about. Much of this we solicited, in fact, and then proceeded to disregard it item by item. Eager to get results, we plunged into our work with the valor of ignorance, the result being that Drew was shot down in one of his first encounters, escaping with his life by one of those more than miracles for which there is no explanation."  -- Jimmie Hall, Lafayette Escadrille and the US 94th Pursuit Squadron, "High Adventure"

On September 1, 1939, the major European powers joined the three-sided global conflict between fascist militarism, communism and democratic republicanism, in a conflict we now call World War II.  Anyone who had read Mein Kampf and took it seriously knew it was coming.  Winston Churchill, for example. 

On December 7, 1941, Japan brought the United States into the war by attacking Pearl Harbor, an event that was predicted by a popular 1909 book The Valor of Ignorance by Homer Lea.  Lea, who died three years after the publication of his prophetic book, was derided by his contemporaries and almost forgotton by the American public until the Pearl Harbor attack.  As Clare Booth wrote in the Introduction to the 1942 edition:

"Writing eight years before the outbreak of World War I, twenty-nine years before the Japanese attach of Manchuria, thirty-three years before the outbreak of World War II, Homer Lea states, as militarily axiomatic, that all these dire events--including the surprise attack on Hawaii--would be in time and space, inevitable."  -- Clare Booth, Introduction, 1942, Valor of Ignorance (NY: Harper & Brothers), page xiii.

"Inevitable."   It was inevitable for there was one nation on earth where Homer Lea's "crackpot" book WAS studied avidly-- Japan.  The Valor of Ignorance sold an astounding 84,000 copies in Japan, and was mandatory reading for Japanese army and navy cadets..  It also impressed Generals Adna Chaffee and Douglas MacArthur, both of whom tried unsuccessfully to make it compulsory reading at West Point.

In 1911, Lea wrote another book, entitled The Day of the Saxon.  "Commissioned by British Field Marshal Lord Frederick Roberts, (The Day of the Saxon) predicted the rise of a greater German Reich  based on national supremacy and ethnic purity." (Wikipedia)  At the time of his death he was working on another manuscript, The Swarming Slav, predicting a Russian move to dominate Europe!

This prophetic American military Cassandra was ignored, with results that are now crystal clear.  Of course, Mein Kampf was ignored in its time as well. "Crack pot meanderings of a forgotten fanatical youth," some said.  "Hitler will be more reasonable when faced with the realities of power."  "The Army will restrain him."  "The businessmen are making too much money to let him start another war."   Yet World War II was not only predictable, but predicted and inevitable.  But America in 1941 was a country asleep, working its way out of the depression, listening to Amos and Andy on the radio, its youth dancing the jitterbug to Beeny Goodman.  Few thought we could be involved in another "European" war.  But in the end we did not have to go to the war, the war came to us.

World War II came to us much as the current world war against Islamofascism and its anti-American enablers came home to us on the 11th of September 2001.  But if that was a wake up call, we have now, most of us, gone back to sleep.  We are about to be finally awakened, hard.  Just as we were in December, 1941.  Just as the Brits and the French were in September of 1939.

"It's going to get worse before it gets lots worse." -- Lily Tomlin

So now we have the latest hero of Islamofascism, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Like Hitler, he is a true believer. As Ann Leslie, a long-time student of modern Iran observed recently:

So why shouldn't Iran have nuclear bombs to deter attack from the 'Great Satan', America, let alone the two 'Little Satans', Israel and Britain? Sounds reasonable. But that pre-supposes that the Iranian regime is reasonable.  The mullah-mafia lied through their teeth for 18 years, denying they had a nuclear programme, despite their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  And all the evidence shows that they are lying now when they say they only want nuclear power for 'peaceful energy purposes', despite sitting on some of the largest oil reserves in the world. But, alas, there's nothing which we would recognise as 'reasonable' about President Ahmadinejad, the small, bearded blacksmith's son from the slums of Tehran - who denies the existence of the Holocaust, promises to 'wipe Israel off the map' and who, moreover, urges Iranians to 'prepare to take over the world'. The UN gave him until August 31 to reply to its package of proposals designed to stop his nuclear programme. Significantly he chose yesterday to, in effect, reject the UN ultimatum because yesterday was a sacred day in the Islamic calendar.  It is the day on which the Prophet Mohammed made his miraculous night flight from Jerusalem to heaven and back on Buraq, the winged horse. As one Iranian exile told me yesterday: 'The trouble with you secular people is that you don't realise how firmly Ahmadinejad believes - literally - in things like the winged horse. By choosing this date for his decision, he is telling his followers that he is going to obey his religious duty.  'And he believes that his religious duty is to create chaos and bloodshed in the "infidel" world, in order to hasten the return of the Mahdi - the Hidden Imam. So don't expect him to behave, in your eyes, "reasonably".'   -- Ann Leslie, London Daily Mail, "Why this man should give us all nightmares", 23 August 2006

Oh but Mike Wallace has a different take:  "He's actually, in a strange way, he's a rather attractive man, very smart, savvy, self-assured, good looking in a strange way," Wallace said. "He's very, very short but he's comfortable in his own skin. . . He couldn't have been more accomodating."  Yeah, and Hitler liked to have children and dogs around, so what?  The important thing here is to understand what the guy says, what he means and what he will do. 

Giora Eiland, Israel's former national security adviser, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that if Ahmadinejad ever became the supreme decision maker in his country, he would "sacrifice half of Iran for the sake of eliminating Israel."

At present, Eiland stressed, the ultimate decision maker in Iran was Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 67, whom he said was "more reasonable." But, Eiland went on, "if Ahmadinejad were to succeed him - and he has a reasonable chance of doing so - then we'd be in a highly dangerous situation." The 49-year-old Iranian president, he said, "has a religious conviction that Israel's demise is essential to the restoration of Muslim glory, that the Zionist thorn in the heart of the Islamic nations must be removed. And he will pay almost any price to right the perceived historic wrong. If he becomes the supreme leader and has a nuclear capability, that's a real threat." --  Jerusalem Post, "Iran leadership poses threat", 24 August 2006

Ahmadinejad has made no secret that his vision of the world has no place for either Israel or a non-Muslim West, and that, my friends, includes you and me and our children's children.  Israel, refusing to play the part of Czechoslovakia in this Islamic remake of the 1930s, has not surprisingly taken the Iranian nuclear future very seriously.  As the London Sunday Telegraph reported on 27 August:

Israel has appointed a top general to oversee a war against Iran, prompting speculation that it is preparing for possible military action against Tehran's nuclear program.  Maj. Gen. Elyezer Shkedy, Israel's air force chief, will be overall commander for the "Iran front," military sources told the London Sunday Telegraph.  News of the appointment comes just days before a United Nations deadline expires for Iran to give up its nuclear program, which Western governments fear will be used to produce atomic weapons. Despite Iran's offer last week to engage in "serious talks" on the matter, Israel fears even more than other Western nations that the offer is simply to buy time for Tehran to secure all the technology it needs to build the bomb.  "Israel is becoming extremely concerned now with what they see as Iran's delaying tactics," said Israeli Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar. "[The planners] think negotiations are going nowhere, and Iran is becoming a major danger for Israel. Now they are getting ready for living with a nuclear Iran or letting the military take care of it."  The prospect of Israel "living with" a nuclear Iran appears remote.  -- LST, "Israeli general plots war with Iran" 27 August 2006

Remote indeed.  So where is this going?  It doesn't take Homer Lea to tell you the answer to that.  Absent an unlikely internal upheaval in Iran to remove Ahmadinejad and the radical mullahs who support him (and the Iranian people are by no means happy with the prospect of where this is headed), there will be a clash, conventional or nuclear, between the two nations, perhaps pulling us in after the fact, perhaps prompting us to take pre-emptive action ourselves.  And what does that trigger?

Well, the activation of Hezbollah sleeper cells, for one, with schoolyard massacres, exploding buses and WalMarts, and the like.  Add to that $200-$300 per barrel oil, which means $20 per gallon gasoline, the economic effects of which can only be imagined and the consequent social effects of which are unimaginable.  For in 1941, we were a largely homogenous culture, hard-working, God-fearing, innured to personal hardship by the Great Depression-- a people who believed in the rule of law, fair play and justice.  A people slow to anger but possessing a wrathful determination when provoked.  We were truly Yamamoto's nightmare-- a sleeping giant.

But today?  Do we really possess those qualities today?  Have our people not been morally enervated by decades of government school miseducation, welfare statism, Hollywood's moral degeneracy and the babblings of the treasonable mandarin class of media cognoscenti like Mike Wallace and the "public policy" gurus who "know what's best for us"?  It has been said that our poisonous politics have made two nations of us, red states and blue.  But that is an over-simplification.  The collectivist identity politics foisted upon us by 60 years of politically correct liberalism and Democrat party plantation politics has made us several nations politely pretending to be one.  And one those is an illegal immigrant nation with absolutely no loyalty to this country, or I should say, to the country that this country used to be. 

Consider the differences just between those of us who were born here.  One large bloc believes in God, Judeo-Christian values, the sanctity of life and the constitutional republic.  They believe in free markets, free enterprise and the right to fail or succeed according to one's own actions, for which they readily accept responsibility.  One equally large bloc believes that all good things come from government, that outcomes should be rigged for approved classes of people and that life is precious, unless you're an inconvenient baby or old person.  If it feels good, do it, and no one has the right to judge another and even serial child molesters have extenuating circumstances that should soften their punishment.

And how will such a "nation" riven by so many competing "multicultures" react to hyper-inflation, economic hardship and supply disruptions?  It will be every survivalist's worst nightmare.  And when it is, everyone will say, it was so predictable.  Why didn't we, like Homer Lea, see it coming?  The answer is that despite Sepetember 11th, like our pre-Pearl Harbor ancestors we feel safe.  But we're not.  It is five minutes to midnight and those of us who foolishly have the valor of ignorance are about to get an education.

Robert Tracinski, writing in The Intellectual Activist, said in an essay titled "Five Minutes to Midnight", "The war is coming, no matter how hard we try to evade it."   Wrote Tracinski:

What these commentators are picking up is not an exact parallel to any one event of the 1930s—hence their scattershot of historical analogies. Instead, what they are picking up is a sense of the overall direction of world events: we are clearly headed toward a much larger, bloodier conflict in the Middle East, but no one in the West wants to acknowledge it, prepare for it, or begin to fight it.  The phrase that best captures this sense of foreboding struck me in a long and interesting account of wartime Israel by Bernard-Henri Levy.

Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim—literally “daughter of the waves,” the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered most from the shellings. The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is used to that. It’s not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets—that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day—not necessarily far off—when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude.

For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon. Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore. We should listen to Zivit Seri tell us, in front of a crushed building whose concrete slabs are balancing on tips of twisted metal, that, for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight.

It is, indeed, "five minutes to midnight"—not just for Israel, but for the West. The time is very short now before we will have to confront Iran. The only question is how long we let events spin out of our control, and how badly we let the enemy hit us before we begin fighting back.  We can't avoid this war, because Iran won't let us avoid it. That is the real analogy to the 1930s.  --  Robert Tracinski, "Five Minutes to Midnight", TIA Daily, August 10, 2006, http://www.tiadaily.com/

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We are governed by the same clock of history as Zivit Seri.  There is no time zone shift when it comes to world war.  If it five minutes to midnight in Haifa, Israel, it is five minutes to midnight in New York, Chicago, LA and Birmingham, Alabama.  And I told you all this to make this point:

Get ready.  War is coming.  It will, perhaps, be the final war.  But you don't have to be a New Testament Christian to believe in Armageddon.  Or for that matter, to understand the fragility of large urban human communities.  They require that an almost infinite amount of things go right in order that they function every day.  And everyone knows that in a war, especially in one attended by economic disaster, nothing goes as planned.  If war is coming (and it is, sooner or later), any fool can see now that this country is in no condition to wage it.  It is not prepared mentally.  It is not prepared physically.  So do what you can individually to get ready.  Involve your family, friends and communities in your preparations.  If we are to have a nation at the end of the events that are about to be triggered, its up to those of who can to save it.  Maybe there is Yamamoto's "sleeping giant" still residing in our nation.  We are about to find out.

Mike Vanderboegh

Pinson, AL

GeorgeMason1776@aol.com

http://www.fivetomidnight.alaminutemen.com