Back to Basics

In II Samuel 19 there is the story about an often-overlooked man by the name of Barzillai. He was a Gileadite who helped save King David’s life. The Scripture says of him: “He was a very great man.” Today, I’m going to tell you about a very great man. In fact, I’m going to talk about several great men.

I am reminded of these men, because tomorrow I have the distinct honor of speaking at a giant freedom rally on Lexington Green, Massachusetts, on the occasion of the 238th anniversary of the famous Battle of Lexington and Concord. If you live within driving distance, please come and join us. Oath Keepers founder, Stewart Rhodes, will also be speaking at this event. I believe the rally begins at 2pm local time.

In truth, April 19, 1775, should be regarded as important a date to Americans as July 4, 1776. It’s a shame that we don’t celebrate it as enthusiastically as we do Independence Day. It’s even more shameful that many Americans don’t even remember what happened on this day back in 1775. For the record, historians call this day, “Patriot’s Day.” More specifically, it was the day that the shot heard ’round the world was fired. It was the day America’s War for Independence began.

Being warned of approaching British troops by Dr. Joseph Warren and Paul Revere, Pastor Jonas Clark and his male congregants of the Church of Lexington (numbering 60-70) were the ones that stood with their muskets in front of the Crown’s troops (numbering over 800), who were on orders to seize a cache of arms which were stored at Concord and arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock (who were known to be in the area, and who had actually taken refuge in Pastor Clark’s home).

According to eyewitnesses, the king’s troops opened fire on the militiamen without warning, immediately killing eight of Pastor Clark’s parishioners. In self defense, the Minutemen returned fire. These were the first shots of the Revolutionary War. This took place on Lexington Green, which was located directly beside the church-house where those men worshipped each Sunday. Adams and Hancock were not apprehended. A few of Pastor Clark’s men led them to safety as their Christian brothers were preparing to stand in front of the British troops. Sam Adams and John Hancock owed their lives to Pastor Clark and his brave Minutemen.

According to Pastor Clark, these are the names of the eight men who died on Lexington Green as the sun rose on April 19, 1775: Robert Munroe, Jonas Parker, Samuel Hadley, Jonathan Harrington, Jr., Isaac Muzzy, Caleb Harrington, and John Brown, all of Lexington, and one Mr. Porter of Woburn.

However, by the time the British troops arrived at the Concord Bridge, hundreds of colonists had amassed a defense of the bridge. A horrific battle took place, and the British troops were routed and soon retreated back to Boston.

All politics are the politics of the future. The one cause that we all champion, regardless of our political orientation, is the cause of the future. All that we fight for is the ability to shape the future.

The fundamental political question is, “Do you believe things are getting better or worse?” Ruling parties tend to answer, “Better”, opposition parties tend to answer, “Worse”. The deeper answer to that question though lies in our perceptions of the past and the future.

The left tends to view the past negatively and future shock positively. It wants change to disrupt the old order of things in order to make way for a new order. It hews to a progressive understanding of history in which we have been getting better with the advance of time, the march of progress mimics evolution as a means of lifting humanity out of the muck and raising it up on ivory towers of reason through a ceaseless process of change.

The right often views the past positively, it sees change as a destroyer that undermines civilization’s accomplishments and threatens to usher in anarchy. It fights to conserve that which is threatened by the entropic winds of change. The conservative worldview is progressive in its own way, but it is the progress of the established order. It sees progress emerging from the accretion of civilization, rather than from the disruption of revolution.

Where the left tends to be unrealistically optimistic about the future, acting like a child running to the edge and jumping off, without remembering all the bumps and bruises before, the right tends to be pessimistic about the future. It tends to be wary of change because it is all too aware of how dangerous change can be.

Youth who do not understand the value of what is around them rush to the left. As they achieve a sense of worth, of the world around them and of their labors, they drift slowly to the right. Age also brings with it a sense of vulnerability. Knowing how you can be hurt, how fragile the thin skin of the body, the fleshy connections and organs dangling within, brings with it a different view of the world. Once you understand that you can lose and that you will lose, then you also understand how important it is to defend what you have left.

The vital mantra of the left is do something for the sake of doing something. Change for the sake of novelty. Action for the sake of action. This carnival drumbeat loses its appeal when you come to understand how dangerous change can be. Personal history becomes national history becomes personal history again as you live through it. Seeing what a mistake change can be as you watch politicians disgraced, causes revealed as fool’s errands and crusades fall apart, is a great teacher of the folly of change for the sake of change.

Reagan’s question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” is the fundamental challenge of the conservative that asks whether the change was really worth it. It is the question at the heart of the struggle between the right and the left.

Are you better off than you were twenty years ago or forty years ago?

The year is 632 A.D., and Muslim hordes have set their sights on the Mideast and North Africa — the old Christian world. And the Caliphate, as the Islamic realm is called, will not be denied. Syria and Iraq fall in 636. Palestine is next in 638. And Byzantine Egypt and North Africa, not even Arab lands, are conquered by 642 and 709, respectively. Then, just two years later, the Muslims cross the Strait of Gibraltar and enter Iberia (now Spain and Portugal). The invasion of Europe has begun.

And the new continent seems no impediment to Islam. After vanquishing much of Visigothic Iberia by 718, the Muslims cross the Pyrenees Mountains into Gaul (now France) and move northward. Now it is 732, and they are approaching Tours, a mere 126 miles from Paris. The Western world — what’s left of Christendom — could very well be on its way to extinction.

Europe is currently easy prey, comprising disunited, often belligerent kingdoms and duchies recently decimated by plague. In contrast, the Islamic world is a burgeoning civilization; so much so, in fact, that it views the Europeans as barbarians. The Muslims also command enormous battle-hardened military forces and have enjoyed almost unparalleled breadth and rapidity of conquest, while Europe no longer has standing armies. It largely relies on peasants to do its fighting, men available only when crops aren’t beckoning. Yet the Christian Europeans do have one great asset: Charles of Herstal, grandfather of Charlemagne.

Sensing the coming storm as early as 721, Charles realized he was going to need a professional, well-oiled fighting force if he was to tackle the Moorish wave washing across Christendom. So, using Catholic Church resources, he set out to train just such an army. And now, 11 years later, it will be put to the ultimate test.

With a horde of 80,000 men, the Muslims once again start moving north in 732 under the leadership of Emir Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi. And after defeating Odo the Great and sacking his Duchy of Aquitaine, there is nothing standing between Al Ghafiqi and Paris — except Charles of Herstal and his Frankish and Burgundian army. The two leaders would lock horns in October, on a battlefield between the towns of Tours and Poitier.

When the fateful day arrives, Al Ghafiqi is shocked by what lies before him. The “barbarians” have mustered a force the size of which he isn’t used to seeing in these European backwaters. He nonetheless enjoys a great advantage, outnumbering the Christians by perhaps as much as two to one and possessing heavy cavalry, while his adversaries are limited to infantry. The outcome should still be favorable. And it is.

Charles routs the Muslim forces, stopping their advance into Europe cold. He will eventually chase them back across the Pyrenees Mountains, saving Gaul — and perhaps all of Western civilization— from the sword of Islam. His miraculous 732 victory becomes known as the Battle of Tours (or Poitier), and it wins him the moniker “Martellus.” Thus do we now know him as Charles Martel, which translates into Charles the Hammer.

Yet the Abode of Islam would not stop hammering Christendom. It is now 1095, and the Muslims are threatening Europe from the east.

Listening to Obama deliver his State of the Union speech was painful, considering that he promised that his agenda would “not add a dime to the deficit” while spelling out twenty-nine new programs involving the expansion of government to further extend its tentacles into everyone’s life. And, of course, the only way to pay for this is more taxes.

If one were to try to identify the decline of the American society and system of governance, it would be tempting to say it began with the election of Barack Hussein Obama, but it began much earlier. I am inclined to believe it began in the 1960s when the nation’s educational system was taken over by the teacher’s unions and when education—a word that does not appear in the Constitution—became a federal government department in 1979. The systematic dumbing down and indoctrination of several generations of Americans began in earnest.

One could go back further to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected four times (1933-1945). FDR vastly expanded the federal government, offering many of the same failed programs to “solve” the Great Depression that Obama put forth in his first term. FDR actually prolonged the Depression which ended with the advent of the nation’s entry into World War II. It mobilized America’s manufacturing sector and, after the war ended, was the basis for a booming economy in the 1950s.

Americans, from the days of the pilgrims onward, were always concerned with the moral fiber of their lives and the nation. Despite the nay-sayers, it was and is a Christian nation, though it also offered tolerance to other faiths, incorporating that into the Bill of Rights. The Founding Fathers were classic conservatives, expressing a firm belief in the essential role that religion plays in people’s lives and in society.

Morality was a concern during the “Roaring Twenties” in the decade that preceded the Great Depression and gave rise to the changing role of women in society. The “flappers”, young women, were a cause for concern for their parents as they took to smoking, drinking in speakeasies, and embracing their sexuality. In 1919 women gained the right to vote.

The decline of societal norms takes many forms, the latest of which is the approval for women to serve in combat zones alongside men when their traditional role has been to provide support in non-combat functions. The military has been used for societal experimentation and now embraces open service by homosexuals. The integration of both has opened a Pandora’s Box of problems as women service members are vulnerable to rape or become pregnant due to consensual sex.

Consensual sex is as old as mankind, but handing out condoms in the nation’s schools or permitting underage girls to secure an abortion, often without the knowledge or consent of their parents, only encourages it. The Centers for Disease Control recently reported that half of all new sexually transmitted diseases occur among young people despite years of “sex education” in the nation’s schools. What passes for entertainment, films and television, are rife with the message that there are no limits or consequences to sex outside of marriage.

This photo of at least six aircraft carriers was used to illustrate a February 10 Washington Times column by Rowen Scarborough, but what I would like to know is whether any of the admirals in the U.S. Navy have ever heard of Pearl Harbor? On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Empire attacked our fleet that was moored there and destroyed many of them.

On Oct. 12, 2000, the USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers in a small boat while in Yemani waters, blowing a big hole in its side, killing 17 sailors and injuring 39 others.

At what point does the Navy learn something, anything from the past? If the photo above isn’t an invitation for an attack, I do not know what is. One hopes they are defended by the Coast Guard or other naval vessels, but this just looks like the biggest bunch of sitting ducks I have seen in a long time.

If I am thinking that, so is al Qaeda.

For the past week, I have been spending time in the tenth century—the 900s—that led ultimately to the concept of “Europe” as nation-states we know today as Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. Across the Channel, England, Ireland and Scotland were besieged by the Vikings who also attacked Europe along with the Magyars who ravaged Europe from the East.

My vehicle to the past was “The Birth of the West” by Paul Collins, a historian who takes the reader to the last century of the first millennium; a hundred years of chaos.

Though the early Catholic Church was the plaything of various warring parties, it was the glue of society, infusing all aspects of life despite being the plaything of warring “nobles”, men who sought property and power while providing protection for those under their control. Seen as the Dark Ages from which Europe would emerge centuries hence during the Renaissance, it was the many monasteries of the time that would preserve the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans to pass it on to future generations.

All were united against the spread of Islam that began in the seventh century and which controlled Spain and would be stopped in France in 732 and later outside of Vienna in 1683. It is a battle that rages today as the jihad of the past is being played out in our times. It was a brutal century that concluded the first millennium and one in which the Christianity triumphed over the paganism of the era, eventually converting the Vikings and Magyars.

Throughout the tenth century, life was essentially local with few, except for pilgrims who traveled to Rome and other sites of veneration. Most people did not travel much farther than sixty miles or less from where they lived. One was considered an adult by age 15, people wed by their twenties, and the average life expectancy was 35. The vast bulk of the population was tied to the land, fearful of venturing out at night, entering the forests only to secure wood for construction and to warm homes that were often shared with their livestock.

The “nobles” of the time had rare exceptions of those who encouraged literacy and learning, but most were just warlords. “With insecurity reigning everywhere, people looked to magnates and local warlords to shield them from rapine, brigandage, land-grabbing, feuds, and atrocities by neighboring warlords on the lookout to extend their territories.”

Bad weather could kill crops and result in widespread starvation, Pestilence would take still more lives at a time when healthcare was non-existent. The weather was perceived as in the control of supernatural forces and in this regard current fears that humans are affecting natural events such as hurricanes reflects the ignorance that infused the people of the 900s. “For us the natural world is ordered, self-sustaining, and explained by science; for them it was chaotic.”

Violence was the order of the day. There was no authority present as in the case of today’s nation-states and those who ruled large areas were dependent on local nobles to enforce whatever passed for the law.

Traditionally, the nation celebrates an inauguration as a demonstration of the peaceful transfer or extension of presidential power, but for half of the nation’s voters Inauguration Day 2013 is more likely to be a day of mourning, a day of fear for the nation’s ability to survive Barack Hussein Obama.

Let’s start with the basics. As Terence P. Jeffrey points out in a recent commentary on CNSnews.com, “During Barack Obama’s first term as president of the United States, the debt of the federal government increased by $5.8 trillion, which exceeds the combined debt accumulated under all presidents from George Washington through Bill Clinton.”

Jeffrey stopped at the two terms of George W. Bush because they included 9/11 and two wars, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq. Wars are expensive, but neither evoked a great deal of protest at the time. Afghanistan was where al Qaeda planned 9/11 and Iraq was ruled by a despot who had invaded Kuwait in 1990 when Bush 41 was President and was believed to be stockpiling weapons of mass destruction by 2003. Though no WMD were found, it is a safe bet those in Syria today were transferred there by Saddam Hussein.

I am old enough to remember when the United States successfully concluded World War II in 1945 and entered into a long period of prosperity and, dare I say it, happiness. That began to end with the escalation of the Vietnam War by Lyndon Johnson in the late 1960s. Until Afghanistan, it would be the longest war in U.S. history and costly in both blood and treasure. It prompted repeated protest marches on Washington, D.C. and it caused Johnson to announce he would not run for President again. The 1960s and 70s saw the rise of the counter-culture movement symbolized by “hippies”, the glorification of drug use, and a slacker mentality.

Johnson was followed into office by two terms of Richard Nixon. The Watergate scandal allowed an unknown one-term Georgia Governor, Jimmy Carter, to be elected. “I will not lie to you,” promised Carter. He didn’t have to. What he produced was economic stagnation and, toward the end of his only term, he watched helplessly as U.S. diplomats were taken hostage by Iranian revolutionaries. It was left to his successor, Ronald Reagan, to revive the economy, increase our military strength, and resist the Soviet Union. An invasion of Afghanistan by the Russians would lead to the demise of the USSR in 1991.

Bush’s second term ended with the 2008 financial crisis and opened the door to yet another unknown candidate, Barack Obama, to be elected. Americans were eager to show the world and themselves that an African-American could become President. He was young and said all the right things.

The problem with Barack Obama was that he was a Marxist with a Muslim father whom his mother divorced and who grew up in part in Indonesia with a Muslim step-father. In Hawaii, where his mother left him with her Leftist parents, he was mentored by a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA. Too many voters were either willing to ignore this or were unaware of it.

There are a few things worth knowing about revolutions. Most people don’t participate in them, even if the history books often make it seem otherwise. Revolutions are thought up by small groups of people who then make it everyone’s business. Or alternately they don’t. And those are the revolutions that never happen.

Most people, at any given time and place, are dissatisfied with the government and believe, rightly, that whoever is in charge is guilty of stealing from them, oppressing them and making it impossible for them to live their lives in peace. And they also believe that things are not likely to get any better. Hope is a vanishing emotion that dissipates easily in the drudgery of ordinary everyday work. It may be taken out for a spin on historical occasions, but then it goes back into the barn where it sits for a while gathering dust until it is needed again.

There are however some known crossroads of revolution. A successful revolution usually doesn’t happen among the thoroughly repressed. Those people tend to lack the motivation and skills to face down a modern army. When the peasants revolt, they can often be tricked into going home with some false promises and free beer. It worked more often with the serfs in European history than you would think. It’s the middle class that you really have to watch out for.

People are not at their most dangerous when they’re eating bread crusts and hoping that they won’t die tomorrow. By then they’re often broken, perhaps not individually, but as a society. It wasn’t the people on the collective farms who challenged Soviet tanks in Moscow. Nor was it the Chinese farmers, now being bulldozed off their land, sometimes literally, who stood up to the tanks in Tienanmen Square.

The most dangerous people are the ones who have tasted enough freedom and prosperity to want to keep it. They don’t think their leaders are godlike and they have enough education and competence to think the heretical thought that just about anybody could do the same job as the king, the emperor, the czar or the president. They have experience enough upward mobility to understand that a man’s place in the world isn’t fixed. It can and should be changed. And that is what distinguishes them from the serf. That is what makes them so dangerous.

Authority works best when it isn’t challenged. Ceremony, whether it is that of an emperor or any lesser rank, invests authority with mystical force. Peer pressure and social conformity employ horizontal pressures to keep everyone in their place. Secret police and ranks of informers allow the regime to project an illusion of omnipotent force that seems to be everywhere at once. Reigns of terror create examples to intimidate anyone who might think of challenging the regime.

Revolutions strip away these illusions. The secret police run for cover or comically march out with clubs and guns against mobs, and get beaten to a pulp. The neighbor who rats on everyone sits home and stews in front of the television.

Revolutions happened in other countries. The USSR, their satellite countries in Eastern Europe and Asia, African countries, and of course those banana republics somewhere down south, but one thing is for sure, it can’t happen here. Following in the footsteps of giants who have used these prophetic words of Sinclair Lewis I want to examine how it did happen here.

In the America of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, in the America we inherited from our forefathers we knew that there could never be a revolution. We had the Constitution with its checks and balances, its separation of powers, and its Bill of Rights. These were rock solid, carved in stone, and strong enough to preserve the Republic and safe guard the freedom of its people.

Besides the American people would not stand for some wannabe dictator and his brown, black or whatever color shirt followers marching through the streets and into the White House. The sons of the Pioneers wouldn’t sit still for any attempt to curtail limited government, personal freedom, or economic opportunity. No way! No how! Others might accept censorship, surveillance, and rigged elections, but not us, not Americans. We had fought wars to defend our independence, wars to defeat totalitarianism; we had even fought wars to spread freedom. No, we wouldn’t quietly allow homegrown tyrants to grasp the levers of power.

I sounds so comforting, “It can’t happen here.” If you take a beginning Political Science class in either High School or College you will learn how the government works. How bills become laws, how the legislature is made up of the freely elected representatives of the people, how the President runs the executive branch and the Supreme Court sits atop the judicial branch. You will learn about the Declaration of Independence and how the Constitution was written to replace the Articles of Confederation which were too weak to work. Yes, you will learn all about how it’s supposed to work.

In most schools you will also learn that the Constitution is a “living Document” that can be re-interpreted to fit every generation and every age. The results of 100 years of re-interpretation have led us to the brink of ruin and me to recommend that the study of the Constitution be moved from Political Science to History, since what rules us today is legal precedent and bureaucratic regulation. The courts use foreign laws and traditions to interpret our laws and traditions. The legislature passes laws they don’t read filled with thousands of pages of vague platitudes and goals that the bureaucrats fill in with no oversight and the force of law. And the
President does whatever he wants and no one says a thing.

So how did America fall for the oldest con in the world: “Give me your freedom and I’ll give you security?”

Those who wished to gain power had no ideology or theology which inspired them. They only sought power for power’s sake. They espoused whatever populist themes gave them the broadest support.