India should say no.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/9/10

That President Obama wants to put India on the Security Council of the UN is no surprise. The Pentagon has been planning an Indian military alliance against China since China started getting big. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, suggested throwing France off and putting India on, the better to advance our invasion of Iraq. But India, if it wants to retain the enlightened character of its tradition; a tradition which brought the world not only Buddhism and mathematics, but practically everything else in between, should do what Marlon Brando did in 1972 when he was offered an Academy Award. Turn it down.

Or at least wait until Thursday, when the so-called G-20 meets. Germany will take the initiative, China and Russia will apply pressure. India should decide then if it wants to join the century rising or be America’s new side meat, taking the place of France.

Probably there are a million of so kids today who wouldn’t mind being drafted in a war against China, as it was when the feds interrupted my high-low-jack game with my young Mafia friends in 1965 to pull us into the army. I was sent to northern Thailand, which was like being sent to paradise. India sounds even more fun. But America made chooses then by taking bad advice. We make choices now out of desperation and are guided by nostalgia. The Democrats especially long for the days of the draft and war in Europe when common Americans from Brooklyn, Tobaccoville and Fall River danced in a circle holding hands in the streets of Paris; we will always have Paris.

Or not. We are not even sure today that we will always have New York. As historianTony Judt writes about my old neighborhood in NY this week in the NYTs, NY, Jewish or goyim, is past its peak and the “American age” is in decline. But Paris? “Who now would deliberately reconstruct their city — as the Romanians did in Bucharest in the late 19th century — to become ‘the Paris of the East,’ complete with grand boulevards like the Calea Victoria?” No question. Today, Sarko is Angela’s bitch.

By the time Judt got there, most of the art people had already moved to Williamsburg across the river. And if New York is dead, someone forgot to tell Eli Manning, Judge Andrew Napolitano and Charlie Gasparino. But he describes Derrida’s America, not Toby Keith’s.

Still, Thursday’s G-20 gathering is key to the rising paradigm of “post America.” It is a trend in academia today but America’s great man, Ambassador George Kennan, the father of “containment”, first fired a warning. In one of his last books, “Around the Cragged Hill,” (1994) he described a new America which might be described as a United Nations of America:

“I have often diverted myself, and puzzled my friends, by wondering how it would be if our country, while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government, were to be decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment.” He might be regarded as the first Tea Partier.

This could be a better America then the last. At the end of his life Kennan also took to the idea of a Council of Elders which resembles what used to be a Senate. Picture one from each region; a council of 12. Suppose, before the world war ahead in the East, which Anglo/America has been building to since 1834, the American potentate would have to get permission, or not, from 12 regional governors before she turned to the Congress of Easter Peeps for its rubber stamp. And suppose they were people like Virginia Senator Jim Webb for the South, Governor Rick Perry for Texas and Joe Miller for Alaska.

Visualize that.