Tag: Continental Army

Collectivism Addiction – The US Society Circles the Drain

The masses have been sold that collectivism, the whole “Diversity and Inclusion” agenda (typical these days to name things opposite of what they actually accomplish, like war on terror, war on poverty, Anfifa and BLM), has been projected to make a better tomorrow, for the “greater good”.

Puke. Anyone with critical thinking skills knows that people are unique individuals, endowed by their Creator with unique talent and gift set, that in community with others “can” achieve amazing things to the benefit of society. Most of the time, this is serendipitous, luck or I contend, a God-arranged group for such a time. Think militias in South Carolina colony that kept Cornwallis behind in his agenda to roll up the southern colonies and join Clinton in the north to finish off George Washington.

From an eight year old article in Lew Rockwell’s web site ( ‘The Scourge of Collectivism’ ) comes some pretty accurate critique of this whole collective approach to life, that no doubt only benefits the ruling elites in the long term.

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”

~ Eric Hoffer

Yes, Nazism is pure collective and totalitarian thought. You can group this with Fascism, Socialism, Communism and even Democracy.

As Butler Shaffer pointed out in the past in his great article titled Collectivist Utopias:

“All political systems are socialistic, in that they are premised upon the subservience of individual interests to collective authority.”

Politics is the place where good ideas go to die. I have seen this inside big business, small churches and the US government.

“Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective — society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. — is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as a part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it.”

~ Leonard Peikoff

This is America’s greatest loss in the last century, the lure of collectivism is an easy out for the masses to pretend they are helping.

The mind of the collectivist is empty and pitiful, and has not the ability to think on its own. It has no uniqueness; it has no individual personality. It does not create, nor does it possess any sense of self. The collectivist mind can’t possess these virtues because it is only a very small cog in a wheel of the group. It is but a speck in the midst of a mob. This is the story of America today, as collectivism runs rampant and individualism is shunned.

It is a very sad story that runs counter to what the founding generation had to offer each colony, the American colonies and the world. Acting as individuals that each could think for themselves, militias came and went, bad battles/strategies had no one to fight them, good battles/strategies had plenty of volunteers. The collective Continental Army was not as lucky.

When collectivism takes hold, individual rights naturally disappear, and mob rule policies take root. This policy transformation of course, is affected by the state. The progression from a system that is based on individual self rule and individual sovereignty to one of community or nation is not in the interest of freedom and liberty. When any political system is in place, this negative progression is easily achieved nonetheless. Only peaceful anarchy allows for the individual to be truly sovereign. Only when the state is absent can freedom flourish.

Ruling “elites” crave this merging of individuals into a societal tumor, because this cancer destroys the power of individual thought. The result of this diseased system can lead only to consensus and compromise. It can lead only to corruption. Consensus leads to no real decision at all, and the following compromise is nothing more than a mass combining of ignorance. When political policy is decided in this manner, it serves only to limit the individual’s ability to achieve.

The state is the poison for society. The state must be minimized for liberty and freedom to thrive. Perceived safety as a goal always leads to little liberty and little safety in the long term.

“.. In the United States today, virtually everything is decided by the few, but with the implied consent of the mob. The U.S. political system has major aspects of socialism and fascism, and is certainly an oligarchy, but most have the misguided notion that the mob is in charge. This is due to a belief by the masses in the farce of voting. Voting gives the false impression that the voters themselves are in control, but nothing could be further from the truth. In essence, those voted into office as “representatives” of the people, are fully controlled by very powerful interest groups, and these groups are the real rulers. This is a very flawed system, but it is one that gives the false impression that the majority rules. That is simply not the case, and even if it were, it would still be immoral! This system is accepted and embraced by the crowd, but in reality, why should anyone rule over anyone else, majority or not? How can freedom survive in a place where one has the power to rule over another? I can tell you, it can’t!..”

In 2020, only those in denial still believe that voting matters.

Finally, be aware of all the ways this collective thought, sounding so true when first heard, can be destructive of families and communities, which is the ultimate goal of the ruling elites.

“.. The collective “we” has been brainwashed into believing that self-interest, self-responsibility, and self-sufficiency are not in the best interest of the group, but just the opposite of course is the case. This brainwashing has been accomplished through a long indoctrination process that is still firmly in place…”

  • Consider the government’s “public” school system, where most every child in the country is taught the same nonsense for most of his learning years, and is indoctrinated throughout childhood to love first his community, state, and nation.
  • Consider the worship for a constitution that gave massive and in some cases, unlimited (not limited) power to a federal government, and lessened greatly the importance of the individual in favor of the “general welfare.”
  • Consider the reliance on government welfare by the people via the multitude of social programs that are meant to make dependency on government almost mandatory.
  • Consider the mindset of the “99 per centers” that aim to force the so-called 1 per cent to be more inclusive, fair, and responsive to the group.
  • Consider the mob’s acceptance of a heavy and progressive income taxation used as a way to equalize outcomes by redistributing private property for the so-called benefit of all.
  • Consider “public” lands or “public” anything.
  • Consider the idiotic term, “giving back.”
  • Consider today’s strict concentration on race, class, society as a whole, community, state, and nation, all more important than the individual.
  • Consider the mass acceptance of the National Anthem and the communistic Pledge of Allegiance.
  • Consider the constant call “for the greater good of society!”

We need to challenge the promotion of this poisonous thought in unique ways that only the individual can carry out being wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove 🙂

Peace out

-SF1

28AUG1776: Divine Intervention?

In my last post toward the end I made the following suggestion:

.. while at the same time to be grounded in the reality that without some divine intervention, this whole thing could end real bad ..

I understand very well why many will be skeptical. This broken world with broken people have made it difficult to think that there might be a divine presence that is an active force against evil. Religion has also not helped make the case for a divine force that is good, or is at its core love. I am not here to convince you of anything, but only to ask to consider the thought, without accepting it.

There are two American historical occurrences  that come to my mind when I think of when evil almost wins and good (or better) prevails. One is the efforts I have been writing about where Francis Marion leads a militia (volunteer) that ends up frustrating an empire’s army enough so that they decide to quit. You and I both know that another fleet of ships and 10,000 more men could have been sent by the British to make 1782 a tough year and have no need for a Treaty of Paris in 1783 with each of the thirteen colonies signing. The other occurrence is that of Gen. George Washington’s retreat from Brooklyn (there was no bridge there until the late 1800s) to Manhattan in the colony of New York on the night of 27AUG1776 and into the next morning.

Getting 9000 troops across the East River before the British could discover their retreat was a daunting task considering the lack of boats to make the effort. The fact that there was no wind that night or the next morning meant that the British fleet could not come up the East River to trap the Continental Army either.

To flesh out in more detail about this predicament I will pull some quotes from this article on HistoryNet:

Washington now called on Colonel John Glover of Massachusetts, who commanded one of the army’s crack regiments. Glover’s ‘Marvelous Men from Marblehead’ were well trained and wore smart blue-and-white uniforms. They were seamen and fishermen, so they were accustomed to shipboard discipline and were quick to carry out orders…

… Washington knew that Glover was just the man to get his army out of its desperate situation. He also knew that there were spies in the ranks — one soldier had already been tried and hanged for his treachery and several others had been found guilty and put in prison — so he sent a misleading message to General William Heath on Manhattan: ‘We have many battalions from New Jersey which are coming over this evening to relieve those here. Order every flat-bottomed boat and other craft fit for transportation of troops down to New York as soon as possible.’ Then he ordered his quartermaster ‘to impress every kind of craft on either side of New York’ that had oars or sails, and to have them in the East River by dark. Anyone intercepting the messages would think that Washington was planning to bring reinforcements to Long Island; in reality he hoped to evacuate his entire army before the British realized what he was doing.

The weather was still on Washington’s side. A drenching storm kept ‘Black Dick’s’ fleet out of the river and provided cover for the boat gathering. Late in the afternoon Washington met with his staff to tell them his real plans. As Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge wrote in a letter, ‘to move so large a body of troops with all their necessary appendages across a river a full mile wide, with a rapid current, in the face of a victorious, well-disciplined army nearly three times as numerous seemed . . . to present most formidable obstacles.’ The colonel was guilty of understatement.

The entire Northern Theater of the Continental army was at risk. George Washington’s strategy was not working in his favor as they had their backs against a river like this.

The August nights were short, and Washington knew that if Glover had miscalculated the time required for the Herculean job, he would lose any troops unlucky enough to remain on the island at dawn. He had faith in the ‘tough little terrier of a man,’ and to help him he assigned a regiment of men from the Massachusetts towns of Salem, Lynn, and Danvers, sailors all.

The seamen began their work as soon as it was dark, about ten o’clock. The drenched Continentals left their entrenchments unit by unit and moved to the boats in darkness and in absolute silence. Each unit was told only that they were being relieved and were going back to Manhattan. They did not know that the entire army was doing the same thing. By the time any disloyal soldier discovered the truth, it would be too late for treachery. The quartermaster’s men had found only a few sailing craft, so there was much rowing to be done that night. At first the winds were favorable and the boats swiftly made the round trip to Manhattan, despite darkness and unfamiliar waters. Seamen in the rowboats plied them back and forth without a stop, oars muffled, across the fast East River current.

Washington stayed in the saddle, weary though he must have been. For several hours the situation looked favorable, but then the wind changed, blowing in combination with the unusually strong ebb tide. The sails could not overcome the two combined forces. Washington’s despair was partially alleviated when the men rigged the sailboats with temporary tholes, found oars, and rowed. But the tired general realized that many rearguard troops would still be on the island when dawn broke. Their loss would be a serious blow. Yet the seamen continued their race against time. ‘It was one of the most anxious, busy nights that I ever recollect,’ Benjamin Tallmadge recalled, ‘and being the third in which hardly any of us had closed our eyes in sleep, we were all greatly fatigued.’ At one point a rearguard unit under Colonel Edward Hand mistakenly received orders to move down to the water. Its movement left a gap in the lines that the British, had they been aware of it, could have used to smash through the American defenses. But the British didn’t know, and Washington, when he saw what had happened, hurriedly ordered the unit back into place.

In a few more hours luck rejoined the patriots. The wind changed direction and Glover’s men could again use their sails to speedily make the crossings and return. The tempo of the evacuation picked up, but the fickle wind had done its damage. As the dim first-light appeared in the cloudy, gray eastern sky, part of the rear guard was still on the wrong side of the river. As the sky lightened, however, a dense fog rolled in, obscuring the operation’s final movements. Colonel Tallmadge was in one of the last units to leave, and with regret he left his horse tied on the Long Island shore. Safe in New York, the fog as thick as ever, Tallmadge said, ‘I began to think of my favorite horse, and requested leave to return and bring him off. Having obtained permission, I called for a crew of volunteers to go with me, and guiding the boat myself, I obtained my horse and got some distance before the enemy appeared in Brooklyn.’ When the morning fog began to lift and the British patrols warily came to check on the American breastworks, they found them empty. Washington and the last of the rear guard were aboard the boats and sailing to safety. George Washington’s faith in John Glover and the seagoing soldiers had been vindicated. In about nine hours they had whisked 9,000 men and their supplies and cannon out from under the noses of the British. The Revolutionary cause lived on. Later that day, August 30, 10 British frigates and 20 gunboats and sloops finally sailed up the river. They were too late.

Not unlike the thunderstorm and tornado that made the British burning and sacking of Washington DC on 24AUG1814 stop prematurely, this “act of nature” changed the course of history.

“Incredibly, yet again, circumstances – fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often – intervened.” – Historian David McCullough from his book 1776

I will leave it to y’all to decide in your own minds.

Just my two cents .. your mileage may vary.

-SF1