Breitbart National Security senior editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, joined Sirius XM host Stephen K. Bannon on the Memorial Day edition of Breitbart News Daily to talk about the importance of honoring our war dead, in the midst of a 15-year-long war that may not even have reached the “end of the beginning” stage yet.
Gorka feared that Western civilization may have been weakened enough to put the outcome of this long war in doubt, and it’s not a problem easily addressed by replacing a few political leaders.
“We don’t think of being ‘at war,’ and that’s despite the fact that the Republic is now engaged in the longest war it has ever been in, since 1776,” he observed. “We don’t treat it as a war. The population doesn’t understand it as a war. Our political leaders don’t talk about victory. They talk about “degradation of the enemy,” and all kinds of postmodern gibberish.”
“The fact is that terrorism, or the enemy that is today beheading our fellow countrymen, selling people as sex slaves on markets in the Middle East – this is treated as a nuisance, as a distraction, from the everyday culture of celebrity, and business as usual, and ‘I’m going to the shopping mall.’ So we have a true existential, and epistemological, and ontological problem here, because we just don’t understand conflict the way that our forebearers did,” Gorka warned.
Gorka proposed that understanding the true meaning of Memorial Day could help Americans appreciate the dimensions of the civilizational struggle they are engaged in.
“It’s not just another holiday,” he said. “It’s not just another reason to have a barbecue, and when people say ‘Happy Memorial Day,’ you have to stop and just stare at them and say, ‘What do you mean, Happy Memorial Day?’ I think we have to go back to the basics. What is the purpose of Veterans Day, what is purpose of Armistice Day? It is to remind us that every war is about the maintenance of peace. That may seem weird or contradictory to the millennials screaming at the Bernie Sanders rallies.”
“Churchill said it the best. He said, ‘You go to war to guarantee a better peace.’ It’s not about these pathetic conspiracy theories about Halliburton, oil, the Bushes, and secret pacts made in smoke-filled rooms in New York. It’s about the sanctity of the individual, as reflected in our founding documents. And it is the man on the wall with the gun who makes the system possible,” Gorka declared. “And if you don’t like that, well, you don’t understand the United States of America.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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