My battalion, the 43rd Combat Heavy Engineer Battalion, was sent into Somalia with the 10th Mountain Division in January 1993, by George Bush 1 on Operation Restore Hope to provide humanitarian relief to the Somali people after the collapse of their government and civil society. Mogadishu reeked of rotting corpses when we stepped off that 747 and the roadsides were lined with the too-shallow graves of those who had died of starvation and where buried where they lay.

Somalia, as a modern nation, is a new country. When under Italian colonial administration, it was one of the most advanced parts of north Africa, but in the decolonization movement after World War 2, Somalia became an independent nation in 1960. That went fairly well for a few years, but then the communist revolutions that were sweeping Africa swept the “democratic” government out and a communist dictatorship took power. Like all the other socialist states in Africa, the communist dictatorship was only able to hold power through brute force and the nation descended into a bloody civil war in 1991. And that’s where the United Nations and the United States got involved.

By the end of 1992, Somalia was a disaster. When we put boots on the ground there wasn’t a single watt of electricity being generated for public use. Any electricity in Somalia was being produced and used by the various warring factions. I’ll never forget sitting in the cockpit of a New Zealand Air Force plane flying into Mogadishu from Kismayo at night and seeing tiny points of light where various United Nations forces were encamped floating as it were in a sea of total darkness.

As I said, the 43rd was a heavy engineer battalion and we were building encampments for UN forces and repairing the road system for humanitarian convoys to get out to the villages. Our headquarters was in Baidoa and we had companies in Bardera and Kismayo. Beside the highway between Baidoa and Bardera was a large farm equipment dealership – I think it was John Deere – that was sitting abandoned with a new tractor on blocks and stripped out front. My Chaplain Assistant and I would make the drive between these to cities to visit our soldiers. On one of these drives, I saw a farmer working a small plot of land next to the dealership. He was using a wooden plow being drawn by a donkey, and the donkey didn’t even have a decent harness; it was pulling the plow by a rope around its neck. Somalia had gone from a food exporter with a highly developed farming infrastructure to mass starvation in only two years.

You know the rest of the story. After Operation Restore Hope, Mr. Clinton became president and turned from humanitarian relief to nation building. We went from Restore Hope to Continue Hope to Blackhawk Down and retreat. (Afghanistan and Iraq anyone? You think we’d know by now it is not possible to impose western civilization and values on a people far different from our own!)

Why do I tell this story? America is in the midst of a civil war between the Tear It Down, Burn It Up, Cancel It in Order to Build Back Better mob and the Let’s Keep What We Have and Improve It as Needed folk. The BBBs don’t know how this works. You destroy a society and you have no idea what you will get in return. And the BBBs don’t read history. Every revolution results in massive death and destruction. Do they not remember the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Cambodian Revolution, and Somalia? America is not special – at least not special in the sense that it can survive a Progressive takeover without death and destruction, decline and decay. And it is interesting that we have a Somali Progressive out of Minnesota, a Puerto Rican Progressive out of New York, and an Indian Progressive out of Washington leading the charge over the cliff. Those who do not love the civilization built over the centuries in Europe and brought to these shores always want to tear it out and replace it with their utopian vision. Sorry Mr. Biden, you and yours don’t have a vision for America that is better than the one you’re replacing. It is dystopia not utopia. I’ve seen it elsewhere and it doesn’t work.