When Did We Become a Pacifist Nation?

RUSH: This is Jason in New Braunfels, Texas. You’re next, sir. I appreciate your patience. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Happy New Year to you.
RUSH: Same to you, sir.
CALLER: I’ve always thought something. I wanted to ask you this question. You were talking about toughness in the first hour, and I knew when people didn’t flock out to see the movie about United 93 that we were going to lose the election in November, for many of the same reasons you outlined, just the general, overall loss of toughness, and I wanted to ask you if you think it would have been better if the Americans had defeated the Russians militarily versus politically in the Cold War? Because I think a lot of this Oprah-fication of America began when we didn’t have to go mano-a-mano with the Russians back in the day.
RUSH: You know, I hadn’t thought of that, and rather than just give a knee-jerk answer that would appear on liberal websites, I would like to think about that, because it is an interesting point. It’s dangerous to play the “if” game. We don’t live in a TiVo world. We can’t rewind it back then and change the outcome. It is what it is, but it does give thought… I always love explaining motivations, or understanding them so I can explain them. It’s one thing to tell people that John Kerry and Algore are actually not interested in preserving the institutions and traditions that made this country great. They would as soon turn over our national defense to the United Nations. People don’t want to believe that!
They don’t want to deal with it, don’t understand it, don’t want to try to get their arms around it, because their question is: “Why would they do that?” Most Americans cannot understand why any American would want to destroy the fabric that keeps this country a sovereign nation. They just can’t understand it. They wouldn’t. Most people don’t want to consider it, and so in trying to explain why I think that people on the left are elitist and have this desire to be “globalists” and so forth, I have to come up with a motivation for people like Gore and Kerry and whoever else.
CALLER: Well, like that other guy that called earlier, about “winning the peace.” You know, I can describe that guy for the audience perfectly. He couldn’t even handle being asked how old he was! He probably drives a Subarau Legacy, has all of his presets on FM to NPR, and now no longer Air America, he sips white wine, and puts his kids in time-out versus spanking them!
RUSH: (laughing) Here’s the thing about all this, is that something made this guy this way and something’s kept him this way. He’s 45 years old. So we can come up with all the humorous explanations for what he is, but how do you explain how it happened? Well, you can say, “Okay, he got caught up in conflict resolution class somewhere along the line in school, had a bunch of passive professors, could be his parents,” who knows? But if that guy hadn’t called and hadn’t said the things he said, had I just tried to explain to people there are people like that out there, most people would say, “Oh, come on, Rush! They’re not that way. I can’t believe it. You’re exaggerating a little bit.”
CALLER: No, you’re not.
RUSH: No. Of course we’re not. So to try to explain why the American people, to get back to your original point, why the American people to me have become a nation of pacifists: I think there’s so many factors that it would be difficult to go back and say, “You know, if we had really achieved a big time military win over the Soviets, then we’d be a little tougher than we are today,” and I know what your point is, that we won the Cold War without firing a shot, and we did it with words and doctors and nurses and clean water, but we didn’t. We did it with deterrence and we did it with a robust and strong military and a president who everybody feared had the will to use it. This is still a world governed by the aggressive use of force, and it always will be.
But we have a country, God love it, that is so affluent, with so much opportunity for prosperity every day, that people who don’t want to realize and deal with the fact that we face an enemy that would like to wipe us out, don’t have to. They’re not needed to win it, and if they don’t think they’re needed, it may as well not be that big, it might as well not be that large a matter. But I think it’s a cumulative thing that has been creeping up on us for years and years and years, and I think as Shelby Steele has written, one of the things that’s happened — and it has been a slowly creeping thing, too, ever since even prior to civil rights movement. But the multicultural curricula in all the schools today has successfully imposed a bunch of guilt on the American people.

We are guilty because we’re a majority. We’re guilty because we’re the biggest. We’re guilty because we’re the most powerful; we’re guilty because we’re the richest, because what did we do to become all that? “Well, the first thing we did was kick the Indians off their own land! Why, they were at one with nature, and then we imported racism and sexism and bigotry and homophobia and we destroyed the environment! We’re destroying the planet with global warming. We deserve a comeuppance! We deserve to lose in Iraq! We deserve to lose everywhere else! We need to get ourselves cut down to size!” All of this guilt is what allows illegal immigration to go unchallenged by a whole lot of people, just a number of things. So to cite one example as the primary cause would be a difficult thing to do, but I appreciate the call.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
John in Washington, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: How you doing, Rush?
RUSH: Couldn’t be better, sir.
CALLER: You were pretty good for two hours, the last time I saw you on November 16th down at the Warner Theatre. (audio, transcript)
RUSH: That was fun. That was a lot of fun. Thank you.
CALLER: Yeah, I was the white guy in the front row showing you that I received the Limbaugh Letter that day and you grabbed it out of my hands and autographed it for me, and I didn’t expect that, but I appreciate it, thank you very much.
RUSH: You’re more than welcome, sir. I’m a nice guy. Spread the word.
CALLER: I want to get back to this fellow from Ohio, I guess, he mentioned Parma, Ohio, and you “have to give peace a chance.”
RUSH: You know, it’s not just Parma. You’re going to run into the same thing anywhere. You’ll run to people from Defiance, Ohio. It’s something in the water or something. There are a lot of people like this.
CALLER: Well, with the last election, I can understand where he’s coming from because there are a lot of people that felt the way he did. They’re sick of the war, but his idea that you can just establish peace because it’s the right thing to do isn’t born out by history, and I’m looking at yesterday’s Washington Post, and there’s an article in there by Stephanie McCrummen about Somalia, and apparently the only reason they got peace there after all these years is the Ethiopian forces drove out the Islamic terrorists!
RUSH: Exactly right. Exactly right. Here is the story. “Defeated Somali Islamists fled their last stronghold and headed toward the Kenyan border Monday on what looked like the end of nearly two weeks of war with the Ethiopian-backed government.” The lesson here is you win over terrorists with force! The Ethiopian government was not going to take an Islamic regime in Somalia, and they went in there and they wiped these guys out as they were in the beginning throes of establishing their terrorist haven or whatever. It took two weeks, and they ran ’em out. There is a lesson there, and it did bring peace — well, in their world terms — to Somalia. But pacifists and peace, they never understood what peace is. Peace to them is surrender, basically.