The March to Tyranny

Aug 22, 2022

It can be real easy to get depressed if you don’t know history. Once again, as we look around our poor old planet, we see tyranny on the march. From Vlad Putin’s legions in Ukraine to Xi Jiping’s threats against Taiwan to corrupt authoritarians in ostensibly “free nations”…it appears some days like the bad guys are winning. They just keep taking territory and they never go to jail do they?

But…but you must remember the march of tyranny throughout history.

Napoleon seemed invincible, didn’t he? And then he invaded Russia with an army of 600,000 men! The Russian military was vastly outnumbered. But every advance of Napoleon brought him closer to things that were out of his control…like the Russian winter. “General Winter” and cosssck hit and run attacks bled his army down to barely 50,000 frozen men. Napoleon came back…only to be crushed at Waterloo, and all his triumphs evaporated while he slowly died in exile.

Hitler seemed invincible for the first two years of World War 2. But every advance of his army only brought him closer to his doom in his bunker in Berlin.

The Japanese advance in the Pacific was lightening fast, but then came Midway, then Guadalcanal, and Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. A little over three years after Pearl Harbor was Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri.

Stalin and his Soviet Empire seemed invincible too. Stalin died “peacefully” in his own bed, the master of eastern Europe. And his communist empire continued to inexorably swallow up nations for the next 30 years. I remember as a teenager being convinced that the Soviets were actually going to defeat and enslave us. But as the Soviet Union expanded…it simply could not supply and control all it’s conquered territory and client states. The bigger it got, the weaker it became.

And it imploded: the hammer and sickle was hauled down over the Kremlin on December 25, 1991. Thank God.

It looks like other bad guys…like Xi Jiping of China for example…are invincible, doesn’t it? But the Chinese economy is already starting to crack. The communist tyrants can’t keep millions of people locked up in their apartments forever. Who knows what will happen, but the corrupt politburo in Beijing is not as powerful as they seem.

Just remember this lesson from history…every step of apparent victory for a tyrant only brings them closer to crushing defeat. All tyrants fall.