Wednesday, March 31, 2010

"Forever, there will be in my heart the lust to kill evil men."

Why, when this finally comes down to the muzzles of rifles, you may blame the "Dead Elephant Party."



Gen. Buford: You know whats going to happen here in the morning? The whole damn reb army is going to be here. They'll move through this town, occupy these hills on the other side and when our people get here Lee will have the high ground. There will be the devil to pay! The high ground! Meade will come in slowly, cautiously. New to command. They'll be on his back in Washington. Wire hot with messages 'Attack! Attack!'. So he will set up a ring around these hills. And when Lee's army is nicely entrenched behind fat rocks on the high ground, Meade will finally attack, if he can coordinate the army. Straight up the hillside, out in the open, in that gorgeous field of fire. We will charge valiantly... and be butchered valiantly! And afterwards men in tall hats and gold watch fobs will thump their chest and say what a brave charge it was. Devin, I've led a soldier's life, and I've never seen anything as brutally clear as this. It's as if I can actually see the blue troops in one long bloody moment... going up the long slope to the stony top... as if it were already done... and already a memory. An odd, set... stony quality to it. As if tomorrow has already happened and there's nothing you can do about it. The way you sometimes feel before an ill-considered attack... knowing it will fail... but you cannot stop it. You must even take part and help it fail. . .

They'll be coming in force. There could be 20,000 coming down that road in the morning. If we hold this ridge for a couple of hours, we can keep them away. We can block that road until our main body gets here. We can deprive the enemy of the high ground!

Colonel Devin: The boys are ready for a brawl. No doubt of that.

Buford: We'll force the rebs to deploy. That's a narrow road they'll be coming down. If we stack them up, it will take them a while to get on track to get into position. Is Calef's battery up yet?

Staff officer: His six guns are deploying now.

Buford: How far back is Reynolds with the main force?

Staff officer: About 8 miles, sir. Not much more.

Colonel Gamble: Sir, you were right. My scouts report the rebel army is coming this way for sure. They're all concentrating in this direction.

Buford: We'll hold here in the morning. Long enough for Reynolds and the infantry to arrive. If we hang on to the high ground, we have a chance... to win this fight that's coming. Understood?

Gamble, Devin, Staff Officers: Yes, sir.

Buford: Post the cannon along this road, the Chambersburg Pike. The rebels will hit us at dawn. I think we can hold them at least 2 hours.

Devin: Hell, General, we can hold them all the livelong day.

Staff officer: He's right, sir.

Devin: At Thoroughfare Gap, you held against Longstreet. You held for six hours.

Gamble: And they never came. We held for nothing.

-- Gettysburg, 1993.


My friend Bob Wright and I were talking this morning after his successful training exercise in the New Mexico desert. His recruits were so eager and committed that the instructors, mostly older guys, had trouble keeping up. They absorbed the new lessons, these men without military experience, so fast that the instructors had to add material to the curriculum.

But in the larger picture, the political picture, Bob was frustrated.

Twice in recent memory, Bob pointed out, popular political movements have breached the wall of the federal leviathan. The first in 2005, when the Minutemen embarrassed the Bush administration along the southern border and then a popular uprising of activists rammed the Amnesty Bill back down the throats of the Bushies and their allies of both parties in Congress. A well-timed alternate bill without amnesty could have secured the border at that point and ended the argument for a while. The GOP, allowing the Minutemen to be denounced as "vigilantes" and the natural outrage at the destruction of the rule of law to be characterized as racist and xenophobic, just stood there.

The people, without the GOP, had successfully breached the wall but the GOP dithered and the moment passed.

Then came the "Health Care" Bill, the townhalls and the Tea Parties. Once again the GOP allowed the protesters to be characterized as racist "teabaggers." The GOP pretty much stood and watched once more as the Dems, rocked back on their heels by popular outrage, were allowed to recover their equilibrium. The momentum to kill the bill was lost, and we apparently made the breach, once more, for nothing.

The GOP's failure in the first instance happened because the president was a member of their own party, I suppose. And what is their excuse in the second? Or the third, when amnesty once again rears its ugly head? The undeclared war on the border goes on and on, people are dying, and what has the GOP done about it?

I suppose I expect too much. The GOP is a political party and is only worried about the next election, not defending principle or even the Constitution. They are, by temperment, inclination and even institution, incapable of exploiting breaches. They are not fighters, they are cheerleaders. They wait until the opinion polls tell them it is safe to make a statement.

Wars come about because of political failures. When they write the history of the political failures that led up to the next American civil war, the GOP will garner much of the blame.

I suppose when I issued my call, it would have been more just to have asked people to break the windows of both political parties, for surely they both bear responsibility.

It takes neither crystal ball nor divine revelation to see the bloody road this country has veered off on thanks to the corrupt misfeasances and malfeasances of both political parties.

After it is over, each side will blame the other.

And they will both be right.

I do not expect to live to see that day, but I do expect more than one survivor will understand the follow excerpt from Cecil Brown's book, Suez to Singapore.

Brown was a freelance journalist and later, CBS radio correspondent, who covered the civil war in Spain, the anschluss of Germany and Austria, the partition of Poland, the destruction of the Poles, the fall of France and later, from his assignment in Mussolini's Rome, the Nazi campaigns in Greece and the Balkans. Expelled by the Italians, he took ship for Turkey on his way to the Middle East, which is where the excerpt below comes from. Later he covered the North Africa campaigns of the British against Rommel and then made his way to Singapore, covered the fatal arrogance of the British in the days leading up to December 7, 1941, survived being sunk on the H.M.S. Repulse, and barely made it out of Singapore alive ahead of the Japanese. But here, the Middle East and Singapore and merely in his future. He had made it onto a Roumanian freighter headed for Turkey.

I stood on the deck watching the shore, closing and opening my eyes, adjusting them to the hot glare of strangeness, the way you do when you emerge from a cave into sunlight. I gazed idly at the brightly colored lateen sails of the small fishing vessels, heeled over and moving gently away from our wake. My mind, like my eyes, struggled to absorb new scenes to impinge them on old. I wanted to pour from my heart these words:

For the rest of my life, peace will be unnatural. Forever in my nostrils will be the smell of death. Always there will be in my ears the scream of Stukas and always in my eyes the crash of bombs, and mangled bodies torn apart and streets splattered with blood. Forever, there will be in my heart the lust to kill evil men, the consuming desire for vengeance against men who had sown misery and murder in this world.


I hope that in the war crimes trials at the end of our upcoming civil war, we see in the dock the men of both political parties who by their actions or inactions made it necessary.

When these men dangle at the ends of the hangman's ropes, will someone say a little prayer -- a small kaddish -- for me?

20 comments:

Taylor H said...

I'm sure there will be quite a few things said on that day.

rexxhead said...

Indeed.

In fact, the GOP may bear the brunt of the blame because in our system it is much easier to thwart legislation than to force it... and they did not.

Damn them all.

ScottJ said...

I spent the first 8 years of this century supporting and defending the GOP.

My thinking was that even if they sometimes got it wrong with regard to Liberty they could at least be reasoned with. They weren't openly hostile to our founding principles. Just ineptly blind to them at times.

Having lived through what the Clintonistas did to this country (yeah, seems like a cakewalk now) I would support a less than perfect GOP'er over any dem.

Idealogical purity tests lead to bad things (see some of Ron Paul's more offensive supporters) but we've got to demand more than we're getting out of the GOP.

Dan said...

My children will know your name.

Gary Griffin said...

I have been reading and enjoying your blog for a while now. I haven't posted before because I did not want a visit from the ATF.
One of my favorite quotes from film comes from a movie titled "Desperdo" (I think). "A plitician is just a cut above a child molester."

A formerly free American

Anonymous said...

I'm still holding out hope that the public can be educated and swayed. It's a slim hope, I'll admit, but a hope none-the-less.

The simple message to people across the land is that there are God given rights and there are entitlements. The later is granted by the government at the expense of the former. If you would be free, you must oppose the later. If you would be slave, you naturally embrace the later and oppose the former. The two conditions are mutually exclusive and can not successfully and peaceably coexist. Happily, the former can exist just fine without the later. The reason for our present sorrow is that the later can not exist without those who hold dear the former, for the freedom loving, through their activities, make possible the sloth of those who live for entitlement.

A good friend of mine has been advocating a Red State Succession for some time. I am coming to believe that this may be the only peaceful resolution possible. I had suggested to him at one time that it should begin with a continental congress, and failing the will to convene such, a mutual protection pact amongst States of the Republic including the olive branch of a Non-Aggression Treaty with the Collectivist States. Let them go their way in peace so long as they let the States of the Republic go our way in peace.

This means many of us will have to pick up and move, but I'm considering that even now if my state fails to sue the Fed over this Health Care Mandate.

It's a plan worth consideration and discussion. Unless we are all of us committed to open war between cities and rural areas, we should be looking closely and a peaceful second go at dividing the USA into ideological conglomerates that can better survive and provide more peace of mind and prosperity for their citizens in the way they see most fit.

Christian Patriot

Anonymous said...

Not just the dems and not just the 'fail to capitalize' repubs, but all those folks who sit on their sorry asses and think either nothing is seriously wrong and/or that 'it will all work out ok, it always does'.

It's a sad day when good men and women choose to do nothing in the face of an unmitigated wave of tyranny.

Bob Katt

Anonymous said...

The GOP right now is the epitome of the quote, "All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."

I claim this quote: Show me good men doing nothing and I'll show you accomplices to tyranny.

Eric
III

suek said...

There are those here who have a low opinion of Glenn Beck. Ok...but don't let that blind you to the good stuff he has to offer. A broken clock is still right twice a day.

He had a lecture on Progressives, their influence on the Democrat party and those in the GOP who had also been influenced by them. He drew his graphs showing early Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson and FDR...who most of us were taught by our teachers were "good guys" - but who were strong Progressives. McCain states clearly that TR was one of his early heroes.... To be honest, I had come to the conclusion that the GOP had been infiltrated by Dem operatives over the years - because I agree with you...the GOP has been guilty as well. Beck's lecture was an eye-opener for me because it explained that it is the Progressive ideals that have infiltrated, not the Statists themselves - although the Statists express the extreme of the ideals desired by the Progressives. He helped me understand that it is Progressivism that is the problem, not the separate parties themselves.

Somehow we have to weed out those who promote the Progressive ideals. That means we have to learn the Progressive ideals so that we can recognize the "code words" and underlying principles in order to reject them.

The problem I see is that many of the ideals of Progressivism are very Christian sounding. The biggest difference is that the gospels command each of us to love and help each other - but it is our choice whether we do it or not. The Statists want us to do the same things - and if we don't want to, then they'll make sure we do. No choice. No free will.

Qi Ji Guang said...

After these recent events I am glad to see that Patriots are getting ready to defend this country. Be careful, be very careful out there guys, there are potential Reichstags looming through this approaching storm cloud and they could fall on us any moment. The Hutaree event could have turned into a Reichstag. And now just today, some lunatic opened fire in Washinton DC and killed 4 people. The leftists would no doubt try to use these events against Patriots. Never let down your guard.

Snaggle-Tooth Jones said...

Anonymous Christian Patriot - March 31, 2010 8:32 AM

An increasing number of patriotic "Yankees" are coming around to the "secesh" way of thinking. I'm with you: it's either separation and reconfederation or another bloody conflict to enforce a "union" of of non-unifiable people. Or worse, a war fought by those factions to obliterate the other.

Check this out. This is just one recent article in a recent series of articles (including one in the WSJ) which poses the question of whether or not conservatives and liberals would do better to live apart from each other:

http://biggovernment.com/tlee/2010/03/30/the-ominous-s-word-secession/#more-98462

Even Dennis Prager, of all people, is starting to do the logic.

Of course, actual separation and reconfederation will be a short-term nighmare on a number of levels. But the case is starting to be made that it beats the alternative.

Anonymous said...

"Idealogical purity tests lead to bad things (see some of Ron Paul's more offensive supporters) but we've got to demand more than we're getting out of the GOP."

Yes luckily Scott since both the GOP and Dems (other than Ron Paul) consistently shy away from any form of a cohesive ideological premise everything is fine now.

Don't demand to much from the GOP. You might scare them.

Cory

ScottJ said...

Suek, good points but I have come to realize there are many unknowing progressives out there.

In my (and Mike's) state the Governor has been on this anti-gambling campaign. Sending state troopers in to raid establishments and shut them down.

My pastor and many members of my Church cheer these actions.

I've been trying to come up with a gentle way to point out that the government that thinks it can do this over something like gambling eventually starts thinking it can tell you what to eat, what sort of light bulbs to put in your house and on and on.

Don't want to be offensive and run off potential allies.

Longbow said...

SueK,

You MUST understand that the word "progressive", as applies to politics, didn't just fall out of the sky. To the left, "progress" is defined only, and I mean ONLY , as the advance of socialism.

Everything else is "reactionary".

Progressive means "socialist". Don't use the enemy's lexicon. If you let your enemy define the terms of the debate, you have already lost.

inyourface said...

The feds are scared shitless...

http://www.lvrj.com/news/letter-prompts-higher-security-at-capitol-89641787.html

A metal detector was installed Wednesday at the main entrance to the state Capitol after Gov. Jim Gibbons received a "demanding letter" from an organization ordering him to resign.

Anonymous said...

There is only one political party, containing voters who would rule and the politicians they hire. Internally there is jockeying to be king of the hill, but the outcome matters little to the ruled. When you are ready to legalize immigration and employment to take the steam out of the border war, you might be ready to become a libertarian.

Will said...

No,
they are NOT "scared shitless". If that was the case, they wouldn't be doing what they are doing. They might be a little concerned, but they won't be scared until some of them end up like in "Unintended Consequences". Which is a shame, since if things get to that point, being scared will not do them any good, because it will be too late. Sort of a Catch-22 situation. Which will be unfortunate for us all. You can lead a horse to water...

Happy D said...

FU(K Succession!
Progressivism is a foreign ideology. Imported by the slaver element of the Elitist so called "intellectuals". Imported with the backing of foreign dictatorships agents such as the KGB to name one.

If that is how they want to live they can move to Europe. But not one grain of the soil of the United States should be willingly given to the Progressive, Liberal, Fascist, Leftist, Communitarian, Whatever these slavers call themselves this week!

Anonymous said...

Grammar Obamanoid here:

Please don't confuse succeed/succession and secede/secession. Completely unrelated terms, and we're talking about the latter.

-S
III

Paul X said...

'The GOP right now is the epitome of the quote, "All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." '

You guys are giving the GOP too much credit. They are not good men, but lazy/incompetent/careless. Instead, they (those in government, not R's generally) are every bit as evil as the D's (those in government, not D's generally).

It's no longer D's vs R's. It's the ruling class vs the rest of us. Open your eyes.