Empire Tactics: 1780 Green Dragoons/Hessians to 2019 US Special Ops/Blackwater

The benefit of knowing history is knowing when you are about to be scammed. In the past week we have heard that President Trump suddenly, without the blessing of his neo-con staff personnel, decided to exit Syria in the near-term. What happened next was typical to this empire’s entertainment aspects, people that were against war at some point in their life all of a sudden WANT war in Syria. I mean it was normal to hear most of Congress (who have been lobbied by the Military Industrial Complex – $$$) get upset that we can’t keep our “covert” war there intact since we have invested 7 years there with various rebel groups including ISIS.

It is all indeed a show, and having watched Home Alone over the Christmas break seeing Donald Trump giving advice to Kevin, we can’t be surprised in 2019 to understand that Donald Trump is still acting. All empires need good actors when they approach end of life status, it keeps the masses entertained while what is happening behind the scenes gets more and more desperate.

During the Revolutionary War, the British Empire used 30,000 Hessian mercenaries (30% of the total British force in the American Colonies) towards their attempt to hang on to their empire. Also deployed was their Green Dragoon Legions and the tactics that had local innocent citizens and their property in the cross-hairs of these forces.

During the follow-up of the Iraq invasion in 2003, the US Empire also used mercenaries in their attempt to hang on to the territory in Iraq as part of the US Empire. By 2007 there had been a huge number of incidents where these mercenaries were guilt of massacres throughout Iraq. In fact, trials are still ongoing here in 2019!

A more in depth article is this one by Chuck Baldwin who has been following closely the Trump promises before his election compared to the Trump realities to date. One of the most startling statistics is in the quote that follows:

.. the first two years of Trump’s presidency was a flagrant disavowal of that campaign promise. Not only did Trump not disengage our forces from these illegal and immoral wars, but, as I have documented, he dramatically INCREASED America’s involvement in these wars. In fact, President Trump has dropped more bombs on more people in his first two years of office than President Obama did in his entire last term in office. Plus, he sent thousands of additional ground troops to Afghanistan and Syria and several other countries.

So that leads us to Trump’s latest claim, that the US is “leaving” Syria and also drawing down troops in Afghanistan. Well, it all depends on who is doing the counting and what is being counted. Knowing full well that none of these numbers include deep state CIA operatives throughout the region, if we are talking “official military” personnel in Syria, the US claims that only 2000 are there currently. I highly doubt that. But what is really going on? Chuck says:

This month, in the January/February print issue of the gun and hunting magazine “Recoil,” the former contractor security firm Blackwater USA published a full-page ad, in all black with a simple message: “We are coming.”

Is the war in Afghanistan — and possibly elsewhere ― about to be privatized?

If Blackwater returns, it would be the return of a private security contractor that was banned from Iraq, but re-branded and never really went away.

21st century Hessians! This Empire is outsourcing the dirty work left behind by the 17 year Afghanistan conflict and the 7 year illegal intrusion into the sovereign nation of Syria that Obama pulled the trigger on.

The legacy is trillions spent, that we have a debt for, just to _______? You fill in the blank, is this to keep military contractors employed? Is this to keep the petro-dollar in placed globally? Is this to help Israel out .. perpetually?

And what of the US Empire’s legacy?

Here’s the horrifying part: These “private contractors,” i.e., mercenaries, operate in a manner that is totally unaccountable to the rule of law. Totally! They operate outside the Constitution, outside the Rules of Engagement, outside the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), outside the Law of Nations, outside law period—and also outside public scrutiny. There is virtually no accountability for whatever murders, rapes, plunderings or criminalities of any sort that these mercenaries commit.

More terrorists are home-grown the more the empire’s atrocities are known. This is “job-security” as the US Empire’s last gasp around the globe. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

In summary, Chuck Baldwin concludes:

Combining Special Forces units that are already plagued with rampant abuses of power with mercenaries who are virtually unaccountable to any human authority is a recipe for the worst kind of barbarity and atrocity. This is what the Roman Empire did during its last days of power and what Great Britain did in its failed war against the American colonies. And this is exactly what Donald Trump is preparing to do. In fact, Trump is already setting the table for an unaccountable military force by shutting down military watchdog groups, thus turning off the light of public knowledge and ensuring military unaccountability.

The “swamp” is still intact. The cynic in me points to the root of this nation’s poisonous government. Many, including Chuck claim that if we would just get back to the Constitution … yeah, it was never meant to be “got back to”. As Lysander Spooner said in the 19th century:

“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”
― Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

My thinking, thanks to Ben Stone’s efforts and his manual , has evolved to this:

When I first read this a year ago I just laughed. About six months ago I read this and still thought that maybe Thomas Jefferson was blindsided by this whole Constitution coup d’tat that happened while he was Ambassador to France. I understood that George Washington was a Federalist at heart and wanted a mini-British nation on this continent, and that Benjamin Franklin was getting old and nodded his consent. But the likes of George Mason and Patrick Henry saw through all this and rightfully noted the slippery slope that this document created a path for going forward.

I now think that Thomas Jefferson really thought that there would be another revolution inside a generation as what was created was just an “experiment”, a beta-test version 1.0 of a federated republic that would have checks and balances like nullification and secession options that could keep it grounded until another version could be tried.

I do think that the pioneer spirit of that founding generation did not even last a decade before this country fell back into its old ways. Before you know it you have George Washington taking thousands of troops into Pennsylvania to enforce a 25% Whiskey Tax to fund his government. You can not possibly make this stuff up!

Happy 2019 y’all .. I will try to stay more positive in my future posts this year, if the Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.

-SF1

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun – Ecclesiastes 1:9

30DEC1780: Marion’s Home at Snows Island – Winter Quarters

As of November 1780, Francis Marion no longer had the use of his home at Pond’s Bluff on the Santee River. His home, along with the homes of William Moultrie, John Rutledge, Henry Laurens and several of his own brigade members had been seized by the British under authority of Cornwallis.

So after Christmas, Marion had an identical home to the rest of his men on Snows Island, simple lean-to huts that protected them from wind and rain. What Marion did understand, and has since been applied by other guerilla leaders and is also part of US Military Doctrine, is the importance of having the support of the local population. The Whig community in this part of South Carolina, in spite of having most of their men out fighting the British and Loyalists, was able to provide Marion and his men with not only food but Intel as well. Women and slaves kept the local farms going when the men were absent to allow this local support to happen just as harvest season had completed.

The reward for the locals was that Marion refused to plunder them, and also, for what items that were used by the militia, Marion would provide receipts so that these families would be reimbursed after the war. Marion and his men would then target Tory-Loyalist communities when there were resourcing needs such as when Continental officer Greene asked for slave labor to assist him with foraging and cooking needs for his force on the Pee Dee river just inside the South Carolina border. Raids north of Georgetown by Marion and his men also netted hundreds of pounds of precious salt needed to preserve meat, which was subsequently shared within the local Whig community as well.

By New Year’s Day, 1781, Marion found out he had a new title with the South Carolina militia, that of Brig. Gen. Gov. Rutledge also identified Marion’s core territory being that of east of Camden and above the Santee River. Reflecting on 1780, it is apparent that the majority of the conflict now was centered in South Carolina as over 60% of the deaths and 90% of the wounded happened in this state. The fact that South Carolina held on is in and of itself a miracle, it should be noted that 1781 would be bloodier still!

-SF1

American Revolutionary War: 3D Layers to Causes, Principles Used and Results

The advantage of taking on a portion of this ‘American Revolutionary War’ conflict, as I was able to do in reviewing John Oller’s book ‘Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Won the American Revolution‘, was that I could get my head around how South Carolina became ripe for revolution, how principled was the conflict and how South Carolina dealt with their freedom from empire.

The disadvantage is that nothing happens in a vacuum or in isolation, and so in reality one needs to back up to the macro (Thirteen Colony Federation view) and even to a global view to understand more holistically how all this came down. This last disadvantage I was able to partially overcome with the assistance of a book Captain1776, Malibu and myself first ran across at the Camden, SC RevWar historical site bookstore called ‘South Carolina and the American Revolution – A Battlefield History‘ by John W. Gordon.

This book helped me to understand the rather complex web of issues, real or imaginary, physical or psychological that helped evolve the love of family, love of community and even into a love of a colony/region towards violence-based actions that risked these very things (family, community and colony/region and even culture).

The writer is a former US Marine officer and professor at the Citadel in South Carolina who is now involved with national security affairs in Quantico, VA. What was refreshing in John W. Gordon’s approach was the eye towards tactics and strategies that either helped or detracted from the efforts of either the rebel-patriots-Whigs or the loyalists-Brit-Tories in the very real civil war that raged in South Carolina from approximately 1775 until 1783.

One aspect realized, was the early attempt on the part of the British to utilize the Cherokee and Creek to their advantage in the southern theater of this war the British brought to regain control of the colonies actually led to ‘blowback’, where unintended consequences would rule as a result of decisions made. This in conjunction with the assumption that Loyalists would rise to greatly assist the British efforts showed how much out of touch London, England was with the thoughts on the minds of those in the low country, midland and rolling hills leading up to the Blue Ridge felt in 1775, 1778 and 1780.

Another aspect that came to light when reading this book was the pivotal moment the French aligned with the colonies which caused this conflict to spread to English colonies around the globe as this became a very real world war that involved Spain and the Dutch as well as the French.

Primary to all of this was the effect this effort to extract the South Carolina people from British Empire control in how this region unified to a degree during the conflict, that pitted father against son and cousin against cousin. The effect was specifically where, during and and especially after the war, the upstate areas obtained more say in the government. The fact that civil government by the people themselves for three years in absence of the British royals, that was then forced into exile in North Carolina for a time after Cornwallis occupied Charlestown and much of the region and then back in late 1781 showed that South Carolinians could rule themselves!

Decades later, praise for this effort across micro-cultures inside this state would emerge from the pen of George Bancroft in 1857 in “History of the United States”:

Left mainly to her own resources, it was through the depths of wretchedness that her sons were to bring her back to her place in the republic ..  having suffered more, and dared more, and achieved more than the men of any other state.

This struggle matured a generation of men and women towards principles that will be again used eighty years later when another “empire” would be threatening South Carolina in coercive and violent ways once more.

Hats off to South Carolina’s Revolutionary War generation in their fight for their love of future generations and their way of life.

-SF1

NOTE: Future posts are forthcoming towards a more in-depth review of this new book, South Carolina and the American Revolution – A Battlefield History , in our library

1780: Week of Christmas – More British Pour into South Carolina, Marion Asks for Assistance

As I stated in my previous post that had Marion’s militia patrolling the Santee looking for British supply boats and troops heading inland to join Cornwallis in Winnsboro, SC past Camden:

… the British have a “Christmas present” for Marion, on 21DEC1780, Maj. Gen. Alexander Leslie arrives in Charlestown with 2000 British regulars. The gloves are coming off in South Carolina as the British desperately desire to move into North Carolina in early spring and take aim at Continental Gen. George Washington in the north.

Marion had since retreated to camp a safe distance away and there receives Intel about this threat (or opportunity, depending on how you look at this) as the British continue to prepare for a North Carolina effort in the spring. These troops no doubt will have the duty of ensuring that Marion and his militia remain neutralized as the British prayed he would be with this kind of news.

Marion and his men were camped north of the Santee up river from Kingstree at Benbow’s Ferry on the Black River. Marion’s Capt. John Milton arrives with a letter from Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene. In the past few months, Marion had written Gen. Gates (previous Continental Southern Command commander) ten times and had received only one letter back.

Marion now writes to Greene and informs him about Maj. Gen. Alexander Leslie arriving in Charlestown with a large number of British Regulars. Marion asks for 100 Continentals to come to the Santee and Pee Dee River basins and assist his growing Militia. Marion and his men then depart once again to patrol the “highway” the British use to transfer men and supplies inland, the Santee River and the roads along this river that lead toward Winnsboro. Christmas 1780 finds Marion’s militia on duty one more time.

Nathanael Green, a former Quaker, had formed his own militia in Rhode Island in 1774 and was the most brilliant military mind in the Continental Army, even more so than George Washington. He was a self taught man, with 250 books in his private library. He was promoted from private to major general in the Rhode Island State Army and then was made brigadier in the Continentals at the age of 32. When Gen. George Washington finally received permission from Congress to choose his own leadership, he chose Greene in October 1780 and he finally arrived in North Carolina in early December 1780.

When he arrived to see the condition of the men there in Charlotte, NC, there was a total of 2300, with only 1500 fit for fighting.  He commenced to write to Washington and Jefferson about the state of the army in the south. He also caught up on letters from Marion that Gates had failed to respond to.

Greene was not a fan of the militia and stated that it would take the Continental army to retake control of the states from the British forces. Greenes’ immediate request from Marion was to capture Intel about the British plans and movements and relay them to the Continental staff. By this time Marion knew all about the positives and negatives of militia and had made the effort to ensure that the tendency toward pillaging from whites and blacks on plantations under his command was not to be tolerated. Marion valued what both the Continentals and the militias brought to the patriot cause.

It was in this season of seeing the fifth Continental commander take charge in the south, when Marion and his men, after their Christmas Day patrols retreated to the Snow’s Island location on the Great Pee Dee river to settle in for time in their winter’s quarters. It turns out that they would not be able to stay there long as their services would once again be needed before the end of 1780.

Thinking back, it had been two years since Savannah, GA fell and over six months since Charlestown fell to the British. The fact that the British were still in upstate South Carolina was a testament to the passionate effort these volunteers in the militia expended to not allow the British Empire to regain control of the region or be able to reestablish the colonial legislatures in the south as they had expected. The militia kept the Loyalists from having any psychological edge in the very real civil war that South Carolina was facing.

Stay tuned for more on Marion and his adventures.

-SF1

 

Intrigued: A Ten Year Old Book Predicts a Political Tsunami – Morality Wars

The past few weeks and especially the past few days has been particularly revealing. I have said “only in 2018” so many times this year that it does seem to be the swell one sees before a tsunami. *

(* – actually, not a perfect analogy as the water rushes OUT to sea just before a tsunami hits)

It started this morning when I read this from Lew Rockwell’s fantastic site, an article from Michael S. Rozeff that has a line stating:

America used to greet bringing the boys home from foreign wars with applause. Now there is immense criticism from all components of the pro-empire contingent, who act as if the empire and Washington will crumble because 2,000 American soldiers are leaving Syria.

We are talking 2000 soldiers (if we can trust Pentagon numbers, since they failed their first ever audit and also misplaced trillions, as in, “we can’t account for that money” over the course of the past 20 years) but more importantly is the continued US and coalition efforts in Syrian airspace without Syrian permission!

But I digress, what this article then led me to, which is so intriguing to me, is the relationship between empire, religion and political correctness. I love it when society, and the human psyche can link so many things like this into the “real life” experience here in 2018. Below was my segue:

For an explanation of the relation between the empire and immoral moralism, see here.

It does look to me like I will be spending $20 for this Kindle version of Morality Wars: How Empires, the Born-Again, and the Politically Correct Do Evil in the Name of Good in order to blog about this from time to time going forward. As usual, I have a dozen or so books that I am in the middle of and they all are vying for a blog post or two to highlight my own research and my own learnings.

Here are a few excerpts:

From Amazon reviewer John Williamson, Provincetown, MA shares that the authors of this book point out:

… the US Government has long been involved in immoral actions that have often been justified using arguments suggesting that the action was being taken for moral reasons .. We learn that, “In 1783 George Washington characterized the colonies as `a rising empire,’ and nearly all the Founders saw America as destined to become one of the world’s great empires. A great deal of attention is given to examples drawn from prior empires such as the Roman empire, the Spanish empire and the British empire to name only a few ... They review also describe how the neoconservatives used moralistic rhetoric to justify US involvement in Iraq .. The argument is that PC puts limits on “the range of acceptable thoughts, seeking to outlaw or marginalize those ways of thinking that might challenge the powers that be .. Right PC uses the concept of patriotism to intimidate and silence those on the left who are critical of the war in Iraq. They are vulnerable to the criticism of being unpatriotic .. the PC of the New Left during the 1960s as well as the current identity politics of feminist, gay, and race movements. Their focus is on the ways in which these movements use PC pressures to keep certain issues off the table. For example, in connection with feminist PC such questions as: (a) Do fetuses have any rights? ( b) Or are fathers discriminated against in marriage laws and divorce courts?..

… The authors tell a story of the evolution of the American empire or more precisely what they refer to as the five American Empires: (1) The Fledging Constitutional Empire, 1776-1828, (2) Manifest Destiny Continental Empire, 1828-1898, (3) Allied Global Empire, 1898-1945, (4) The Good Empire versus the Evil Empire, 1945-1991, and (5) World Hegemon: 1991-Present. This section of the book basically reviews the many ways in which the US behaved badly – in the name of high moral ideals – like other prior empires during each of these periods.

So a clip from the book’s introduction states (remember, this is a ten-year old book):

I do not know about you, but I do see, especially since Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, quite the storm, perfect in only that there are so many triangulations involved that the average person can’t keep up and they depend on MSM or the government to explain what is going on.

I still say, there is a LOT to learn from history that helps the discerning thinker and reader to consider things that they previously had made up their mind on. Critical thinking is extremely in scarce these days, however, it is these kind of people that will be invaluable in charting the course in this storm and into the world beyond it.

This thinking will be scary to most, however, as I have said before here, a crumbling empire is a perfect environment for a grassroots, black market, underground networking of Love to give hope during and after the storm, as was demonstrated in the 1st century in the Roman Empire. It will be in that environment I do hope many can entertain a thought without accepting it as they try to adjust to a very different world.

Just thinking of my kids and grand-kids yet again, seems to be a theme .. (yes, I am not your typical “boomer”)

Stay tuned

SF1