Friday, March 3, 2017

Building The Great Great Wall

"We will soon begin construction of a Great Great Wall along our southern border." - President Trump, inaugural address to Congress.

When I think of serious walls, two walls come to mind: The Great Wall of China, and the Berlin Wall. President Trump says that he is building a “Great Great Wall”.   This could lead to another diplomatic incident, inadvertently clashing with China's "One Great Wall" Policy. The Chinese will not take kindly to their Great Wall downgraded to something less Big.   


Nevertheless, these two historical examples  are instructive.  One wall was built to keep people out.  The other wall was built to keep people in.  Both were truly audacious projects, but in the end, neither worked out as planned.


The Chinese definitely win the prize for hubris for the sheer scale of their enterprise, in fact it is the largest man made object in the world.  No doubt their wall cost a lot of money, but it employed a lot of people and helped their economy grow, didn’t it?  And it employed lots of workers for hundreds of years.   And the people it kept out:  we’re talking pillagers and rapists, we’re talking bad hombres.  


The problem only came hundreds of years later when the worst pillager and rapist of them all -  Ghengis Khan - circumvented the  wall and conquered China and all of Asia Central,  and, this is documented, there is evidence in our DNA, this bad hombre sired more children than any other individual in history.

 So much for building a very big wall to protect your country.  China has been there, done that.  Now it’s their biggest tourist attraction.  This shows that with sufficient time, you too can recover from bad hombres running your country.  


In 1961 the East Germans, a client state of the now defunct Soviet Union, built a wall that followed the dividing line between East and West Germany through the city of Berlin.  They built this wall, topped with barbed wire and manned with machine guns, in order to stop East Germans from leaving the Communist East to go to the Capitalist West.  


Then in 1989 the Soviet Economy collapsed, probably because of chronically low oil prices, and very soon after that people tore down the Berlin wall, brick by brick, and within a few years Germany re-united.

Now, in 2017 the new Wall-Builder-In-Chief has officially  passed the baton of "the leader of the free world" on to Angela Merkl;  and this shows that you can recover and heal your nation after a particular ugly wall has been built, and even become the leader of the free world.  


 If you want to know why Trump wants to build The Great Great Wall, you can get a hint from Christian Evangelist David Barton, who runs an internet Website called "wallbuilders.com.    “WallBuilders is an organization dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built – a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined.”   So says David Barton, who calls himself - “America’s Premier Historian.”


 You see: “In the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, the nation of Israel rallied together in a grassroots movement to help rebuild the walls of Jerusalem…”  On this point I beg to differ with “America’s Premier Historian.”   If memory serves me well, the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls was no grassroots event.  It was overseen and funded by the Persian Empire.  It even says so, right there in the Bible. The Persian Empire was the new kid on the block at that time, and unlike the Babylonians and Assyrians before them, they actively supported subject peoples’ keeping their ethnic religious systems intact.


The new Nehemiah is going to build a Wall.  A “Great Great Wall” that will protect all the faithful against “Them”  -  the Coloured, the Muslims, the “Extremist Islamic Terrorists.”  


Nor will the Great Great Wall that is to come  be a grassroots movement,  because the Great Great Wall also requires a great military buildup, and a great new partnership between Industry and Government. That’s OK with Evangelical Christian, David Barton, because he sees Donald Trump’s new administration and I quote him: “I’m loving what I am seeing.”

To build a Great Great Wall  it was necessary  to pass the baton of "the leader of the free world" from America,  to the leader of the nation that managed to break down the last big wall.  This will be a point of interest to future Historians, if there are any.