Category: Civil War

Soldiers heading towards Omaha Beach.

When I was in grade school the teachers spoke of the Constitution with reverence.  As second graders, we listened as the teacher told the story of how it was written and the freedoms it guaranteed us and the responsibilities that it demanded of us.  My grade school teachers were all married women, and they loved America.  It was a small town, and the teachers had grown up in the area.  Some of them had taught their own children and their own grandchildren in the same school where the chalkboard dust, lead paint dust, water from lead-soldered pipes, and asbestos floor tiles soaked into my skin daily.  Even the early reader books were taped together with yellowing cellophane tape at the bindings, and most of the books had been printed decades before.  I got to See Spot Run like legions of boys before me, running my fingers over the same dog-eared pages that had been read for years, young mouths quietly sounding out the words.

And these boys before me, who had sat in the same desks, drew beginning math on the same blackboards, pulling chalk from the same worn, wooden tray that I did, got paddled in the same principal’s office that I did.  They had traveled the world to strange places that their teachers never named when they opened the geography books during the time they spent in second grade.  These were places with foreign names like Guadalcanal.  Bastogne.  Chosin Reservoir.  Da Nang.

One of these boys in particular, a blonde haired young Ranger, was barely eighteen when he was shot climbing the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc on the sixth of June, 1944.  His sister was a friend of my father.  As a young boy that Ranger sat in that same room, learning the same math decades before I was born.  He sat in that same classroom just a few short years before he was buried in Normandy in late spring at the age of 18.  No member of his family could afford to visit his grave until over fifty years had passed and his sister walked to his grave and touched its cold marble stone and ran her fingers over his name.  Despite that, the young Ranger isn’t lonely – he is surrounded by 9,387 of his comrades who died during the invasion of France.

Rangers climbing Pointe du Hoc.

The teachers, those mothers, in the distant past had taught the children the value of patriotism.  The value of the Constitution.  The belief that freedom was a great gift from both God and our forefathers and was an idea and an ideal worth fighting for was taught to them in school and in church.  Those boys who travelled far wearing Army green, Navy blue, the camouflage of the Marines, and eventually Air Force blue were mainly the sons of farmers, used to hard work that started early in the morning and sometimes went too far into the night when the cows were calving.  The things that they were told that were true were God, freedom, family, and country and that you always had to work hard for these things, and sometimes you had to fight for them.  And sometimes die for them.

Even the cartoons as I was growing up were infused with patriotism:

Corny?  Yes.  

The school was torn down some time ago – I don’t know when.  A bond issue was finally passed, and a new school was built.  There aren’t many more students than when I went there, but there are new classrooms.  These new schools are gleaming with whiteboards and new furniture and new books, and from the pictures you can see that the kids look a lot like the kids from when I went there; but the connection with 100 years of history went when the building was torn down.

Change is inevitable, but the one thing that my teachers taught us was that the Constitution was a rock, something special, something that every American had shared for hundreds of years.  It was important, and it protected us, and protected our freedom.

I believed that, the way the boys that live forever on Pointe du Hoc did.

Ladders used to scale Pointe du Hoc.

Today, however, the population of the United States is at least 14% foreign born, but I’d bet that number undercounts illegal aliens.  Second generation Americans, people born here of immigrants, account for at least 10% of the population.  A quarter of the population of this country simply has no connection to anything American.  10% were born here, but were raised in a household that had little to no connection to anything American.

I was working in Houston on one particular job, often late into the night.  The cleaning crew came in after 8 PM, and I was often still there.  I’d taken Spanish in school, and would share a sentence or two with the very nice cleaning woman who came by.  She spoke no English.  One day I asked her, in Spanish, “Why don’t you learn English?”  I realized that this nice person would have no chance to move up, no way to take part in the economic miracle that is the United States without English.

“Es muy dificil.”  It’s too difficult.

The cleaning woman is very nice, but has no connection in any meaningful way to the United States.  I’m sure she’s had children by now as 21% of children in the United States have foreign-born mothers.  Her children likewise have had no part in building this country and have no reverence for the principles of its founding, or the sacrifices made along the way to create freedom.  This is similar to me if I moved to say, England, or Denmark.  I love England.  I love Denmark.  I’m ethnically related to those areas and admire both cultures.

If I moved to England I’d always be the Yankee.  Or Amerikansk in Denmark.  My kids, even if I had kids there, wouldn’t be English.  They wouldn’t be Danish.  They’d be the “kids of that American that lives here.”  Maybe if my kids were born there, and then worked hard to assimilate away from the American attitudes and culture of their parents, then they one day the kids they had would be considered English or Danish.  I’m an American, a product of American culture and no citizenship documents will ever change that.

25% of the people in the United States, however, simply aren’t American by any sort of rational criteria.  One out of four – an amazing number and a number that is going to grow based on current trends and census data, perhaps to one in three by 2060.  The United States has never had such high numbers of foreign born in history.

As these numbers grow, the electorate changes to an electorate that has no history of a representative democracy – most people coming to the United States are from places where elections are not free and fair, and in many cases the politicians from those countries are so corrupt to make Illinois look like a Boy Scout® camp.  These are also places where constitutions are meant not for the people, but for the state, and are changed out with stunning regularity, often accompanied by firing squads and atrocity.  They expect better here, but they also are ready-made for the politicians that promise them the world.

The political class, however, is excellent at creating and playing on resentment in new immigrants with no history of good government.  Division is the strength of these politicians.  “Why do these people have a say as to who is an American?”  “Abolish ICE.”  “You deserve free education, free healthcare, free housing, free food.”  “Living wage for all.”  “Common sense gun laws.”  Thankfully, native language broadcasting is available to all of these new residents and new citizens so that they can avoid assimilation into the culture.

These residents also don’t have teachers that teach that the United States is good, that the Constitution is a meaningful document – times have changed and that just isn’t the “woke” take.  They don’t get any of this from their family, either.  Their family simply doesn’t know anything about freedom and the Constitution in most cases, and probably wouldn’t care if they did.  It’s a document that foreigners put together – it is not part of their history at all.

Pointe du Hoc, after it had been taken.

As I said, I had faith in the Constitution.  It was a great wall that both defined and constricted government, but in recent decades “rights” have been made up from layer after layer of interpretation that have nothing to do with the original text.  On the other hand, rights that are written about clearly in plain language are somehow interpreted to be so limited that they hardly exist at all.  But there are still some protections that exist, as long as there’s a majority of five to four.  Change that number?  Watch those liberties evaporate as Justices that admire the constitution of South Africa, the one that’s being interpreted to allow the theft of land, become a majority.

If we have politicians that actively create divisions between Americans with a heritage of limited government and an increasing number of people for whom the history of the United States means nothing, the Constitution won’t mean anything.  It will be a speed bump for those who have no connection to it and who have no love of it.  The Constitution in the hands of those who hate the limitations it puts on them will, in the long run, provide no safety at all as it is interpreted away, as the press revolts against it, and as the newly imported electorate ignores it.

And what meaning will the blonde Ranger of Pointe du Hoc have then?

“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” – Life of Brian

Well, since the Romans subjugated what is now France, Britain, Germany, and England, it’s sad that they never managed to flourish as independent countries.  Because colonialism is awful, right?

I was having a conversation over the phone with a friend who is a little bit more politically correct than me.

“Maybe colonialism wasn’t such a bad thing after all.”

Coming out of the blue like that, it was, I could tell, a difficult concept for him.  Certainly he understood the words, but in the life he leads, I imagine absolutely no one would have said anything like that to him, ever.  He was currently in a very, very, very liberal establishment.  His brain might have broken from the unapproved thought.  It wasn’t as bad as saying, “I decided that maybe killing and eating calico kittens and wearing their fur as a hat might be a thing I’m in to,” but it was close.  One thing I like to do, in real life and in this blog, is to make people think thinks they haven’t thinked.  Very few pleasures exist for me as when I make people make that face which I call an Oh-face, as in, “Oh, my, I never thought of that.”

Of things that have a bad reputation since the year 1900, the two things that come to mind with the worst reputation are Madonna and Colonialism.    And nobody wants to be compared to Madonna.  What spurred my comment to my friend was an article by Dr. Bruce Gilley, of that noted bastion of conservatism, Portland State University.

Madonna is over 60 now, which might explain her overuse of eye makeup.  Oh, and the hormone replacement therapy . . . . 

Dr. Gilley put forth a relatively straight-forward question:  Is there a case for colonialism?

His paper, The Case for Colonialism (you can find a .pdf of it here – LINK) was published in a scholarly journal with the unlikely name of Third World Quarterly.  Third World Quarterly was described by at least one scholar as a location to come up with anti-colonial ideas.  The reaction was predictable.  Over 10,000 people signed a petition at Change.org noting, in part, that “We thereby call on the editorial team to retract the article and also to apologize for further brutalizing those who have suffered under colonialism.”

It would be difficult to find many people who had suffered under colonialism who were still alive, since the last thing even remotely like an atrocity was the British reaction to the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya.  I can’t find numbers that the Mau-Mau killed, which is a key indicator to me that the number was larger than anyone wants to admit.  Did the British commit atrocity in response?  Yes.  So, if you were counting, probably the last colonial victims would date to the 1950’s, making the minimum age of someone who suffered under colonialism somewhere in their 70’s.

In my mind it’s also pretty tough to claim that a magazine article brutalized anyone, but maybe it’s just the “magazine article proof” vest I wear and a vestige of “magazine article proof vest-wearing privilege.”  For the record, I wear the vest because I was once highly offended The Family Circus.

Yes it DOES look like Steve Buscemi!  Triggered!

Gilley has the temerity to point out that since colonialism ended, things have not always been the picture of health in Africa.  In his paper, Dr. Gilley notes:

Yet until very late, European colonialism appears to have been highly legitimate and for good reasons.  Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonised to colonised areas, fought for colonial armies and participated in colonial political processes – all relatively voluntary acts.  Indeed, the rapid spread and persistence of Western colonialism with very little force relative to the populations and areas concerned is prima facie evidence of its acceptance by subject populations compared to the feasible alternatives.  The ‘preservers’, ‘facilitators’ and ‘collaborators’ of colonialism, as Abernethy shows, far outnumbered the ‘resisters’ at least until very late:  ‘Imperial expansion was frequently the result not just of European push but also of indigenous pull’.

The legacy of colonization appears even today – those areas that were colonies of the British Empire are freer and have lower levels of corruption than those that weren’t colonized by Britain.  Why?  Perhaps the colonies offered rule of law versus tribal vengeance.  Perhaps the colonizers offered science, medicine, and education.  Perhaps the liberty of Western Civilization was fascinating.  Me?  I’m betting that it was mail-order catalogs that were filled with pictures of lacey undergarments, or maybe the taxation system.

We’ll apologize for colonies after they give up the Internet.

But the relics of de-colonization were also pretty clear.  This is one additional case Gilley makes.  In Gunea-Bissau, 25,000 people were killed as colonialism ended.  150,000 were displaced – all from a starting population of only 600,000.  Thankfully, Marxists took over and turned it into a worker’s paradise, dropping rice production from 182,000 tons per year to 80,000 tons per year.  No more tedious time spending cooking and eating!  That Marxist diet plan always works, and thankfully the government feels so much love for their people that they provide a secret police, too!  Gilley notes that at least half of the nations that de-colonized during the twentieth century had similar success at eliminating pesky excess food supply and pesky excess population.

I don’t think that colonization was all party and no hangover.  There are plenty of descriptions of older colonial atrocities, especially when you go back to the 1700’s or 1800’s – the Belgian Congo under King Leopold was one very notable horror show so that the Belgium government took it away from him in 1908 prior to giving the Congo full independence in 1960, yet, today (from no less than The Daily Beast):

Wembore calls life under Belgians “très bon,” despite the segregation, and many of Stanleyville’s residents agree. “I look at the river, I used to see speedboats; now I see wooden boats,” he says, gesturing to the long, roughly carved canoes on the Congo River filled with traders. “This is poverty.”

So Gilley has confirmation from at least some Congolese that being colonized wasn’t all bad.

That doesn’t stop his University from “investigating” him.  You can read about it in this article, but it doesn’t say much (LINK).  Since he still has a web page up, and is still publishing papers that specifically poke the finger in the eye of academia (like this one on how Yemen did much better as a colony (LINK) and this one about how non-leftists are treated in academia (LINK)), I think he probably came out okay.

The question of colonialism remains.  I tend to think that colonization can help a nation, especially if it brings about the systems that allow for efficient administration of a free country and gives the people faith that those systems can work.  None of this happens in a short period of time, and it’s susceptible to corruption and tribalism.  But we simply have to have colonies in the future.  Why?

If we don’t we’ll never get Colonial Marines.

Okay, true fact, Vasquez in Aliens® is John Connor’s™ step-mom in Terminator 2©.

Addendum:  Per the Comments.

With Personal Seal:

“Behind the stubble and the too prominent brow and the male pattern baldness, I sensed your feminine longing.  And it just slew me.” – Being John Malkovich

Maybe it’s good we guys aren’t more in touch with our feelings?

Last Monday’s post (American Apartheid:  Resurrecting Communism’s South African Playbook – In America) provided ample evidence of the singular goal of communism:  power.  Raw, naked power.  In order to get this power, ripping apart the fabric of society to either foster or create ethnic strife is clearly on the table.

What else could socialists attack to destabilize Western Civilization?

The family structure itself.

The family structure is difficult to attack.  It is based on thousands of years of cultural evolution, and is inherently stable.  Recognizing that men and women are fundamentally different, the family structure plays to the strengths of each.  Mothers are warm and nurturing and like margaritas.  Men are stoic and strong and willing to die to protect the family and like beer.  Mothers depend on fathers to provide for the family.  Fathers depend on mothers to be faithful and care for the hearth.  The family structure is built on mutual interdependence.  Add in extended family, and a marriage is the atom of society.

Enter socialism.  To make it worse than just plain socialism, it was a French socialist, Charles Fourier, who coined the word feminism in 1839.  Fourier used feminism as a concept mainly to indicate that women should be able to have lots of sex without marriage, presumably with Charles.

But even a curmudgeon (say, me) will admit, feminism started admirably enough:  the idea that women should have at least some of the same rights to education as men.  It evolved to the more advanced concepts that women should be able to have custody of children after a divorce, own property, and eventually vote, with Iran(!) granting women the right to vote before it was granted in France, probably because Charles was still sore that his idea of “getting women rights so he could have sex” scheme didn’t work.

If it would have stopped there, it probably would have been fine.  Maybe.  But it didn’t.

Fast forward to 1960:  Women’s Liberation® was the next idea that attacked the West, and it was firmly led by Marxists such as Betty Freidan who wrote The Feminine Mystique, which made lots of bored middle-class suburban housewives upset, for some reason.  Mainly because things were too good?  Stupid patriarchy, feeding us and keeping us safe and creating a prosperous economy.  We’ll show them!

But the 1960’s also provided a huge technological change through the availability of the birth control pill.  Add in other leftist and feminist goals achieved such as no-fault divorce, welfare for single women with dependent children, changing family court laws to favor women in child custody, alimony, universally legal abortion, and you have fundamentally changed the institution of the family.

Attitudes towards children changed drastically at this time – look at how children were viewed in cinema:  Rosemary’s Baby was literally the devil’s spawn.  The Exorcist was exorcising a little kid.  Damien from The Omen (again, the devil’s spawn) was yet another kid, and Michael Myers from Halloween starts the movie as an evil child.  Although Generation X was the first post-pill generation, it was also the genesis of the latch-key child, the child who was less important than mother’s career or her search for self, and a generation of children that were marked by parental strife in ways that their predecessors weren’t as the divorce rate peaked in the 1970’s.  No wonder children were shown as figurative monsters in this decade.

And it was all due to the success of feminism.

The previous contract between men and women was broken.  Women no longer relied on a man, in many cases it was sold that woman could break from her oppressive husband and have freedom with her new provider and husband-replacement:  government.  Government would enforce alimony.  Government would enforce child support.  It would provide housing and food for children.  Government could stay out late and drink too much and not even call and flirt with Stacy, that tramp.  There was no need to stay in a marriage that wasn’t fulfilling in every manner or even have a husband – or so the promises went.  Actual quote from that era:  “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Be unhaaaaaappy?  Get a divorce.

Source Dalrock (LINK)

And, yes.  There are valid reasons for divorce.  Unhaaaaaappy?  Not one of them, which is why no-fault divorce is so corrosive.

Many people didn’t fall for the trick, and stayed married.  My parents did, probably because they realized it would require both of them working together to beat some semblance of civilization into me.  Those stable marriages provided a much greater degree of prosperity and wealth than their divorced compatriots.  Stable marriages provided great role models for stable children that didn’t go to jail.  Stable marriage provided the anchor for civic life.  Thankfully, this wave of feminism crashed on the rocks of pornography – one group decided it was horrible exploitation and should be outlawed, and the other thought that it was an expression of womanly power and should be celebrated.  You can guess which group was cuter.

Leftism itself waned during this time, and one primary exporter of communism went out of business – the USSR.  And if that was the end of feminism, well, it had already greatly hurt the viability of Western Civilization, but maybe we can heal.  So, we’re done, right?

No.  In the last few weeks the work of communism feminism continues.

The first thread is the 36 page guidelines of the American Psychological Association® (APA™) that seeks to classify traditional masculinity as a mental health problem.  It reads like a bad Marxist senior thesis from an elite liberal school.  Here’s an example from the report (LINK):

“Because of the pressure to conform to traditional masculinity ideology, some men shy away from directly expressing their vulnerable feelings and prefer building connection through physical activities, talking about external matters (e.g., sports, politics, work), engaging in “good-natured ribbing,” exchanging jokes, and seeking and offering practical advice with their male friends.”

Yes.  This is how males work.  This is how males form hierarchy.  This is why we aren’t known as women.

Wait, John Wilder, you’re telling me that men and women are different?  I have been clearly told that they are exactly the same.

Dear reader, it is clear that men are different.  Why else would Gillette© have an entire commercial telling men how awful we are, which happened just last week?  Clearly, we don’t have a commercial from Playtex™ telling women not to kill their kids by drowning them in a car which would be equally as valid, but it’s still not there.  So, men and women are different, in that men are evil.  Men are so evil that a razor company, which theoretically sells to men, can spend nearly two minutes telling men how awful they are.

How bad was the commercial?  This bad:

(H/T Bookwormroom LINK)

But at least The Woman’s March which happened this weekend is non-partisan, right?  Just seeking to help women, right?

Here are excerpts from their goals (LINK):

• We believe that gun violence is a women’s issue and that guns are not how we keep our communities free from violence.
• We believe it is our moral imperative to dismantle the gender and racial inequities within the criminal justice system. The rate of imprisonment has grown faster for women than men, increasing by 700% since 1980, and the majority of women in prison have a child under the age of 18.
• We believe in Gender Justice. We must have the power to control our bodies and be free from gender norms, expectations and stereotypes. We must free ourselves and our society from the institution of awarding power, agency and resources disproportionately to masculinity to the exclusion of others.
• Immigration reform must establish a roadmap to citizenship, and provide equal opportunities and workplace protections for all.
• All workers – including domestic and farm workers, undocumented and migrant workers – must have the right to organize and fight for a living minimum wage.

So, we have it.  Feminism is strong and growing.  Feminism is clearly leftist.  And not just a little leftist, but full blown Marxist.  There are other implications of feminism that are flowing through society now, but those will have to wait for a future post.  But feminism continues.

Strangely, I didn’t see this list on the Women’s March website. 

Again, the idea is clear:  Create a victim culture.  Create alienation with the social norms that underpin Western Civilization.  Divide a nation.

The goal?

Power.

The irony?  In every single socialist paradise, from the USSR to Cuba to China, feminism isn’t tolerated.

Why?

Once they have power, they won’t share.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life.  All competing pleasures will be destroyed.  But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.  Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” – 1984