Tag: total war

Character Flaw: US Government Has Lied .. Us into Mexican-American War

Continuing on the theme from a few days ago where I titled the post:

Character Flaw: US Government Has Lied Us into War of 1812 All the Way to the War on Covid-19

.. we can go one from one official/unofficial (undeclared by US Congress) war to the next to unpack the gross lies politicians use for their own agendas.

Context for the Mexican-American war that started in 1846 is important because most people fail to remember anything about this war and even less as to what led to it and why this war was so bad .. for setting the stage to the next war or two. (so-called Civil War and Indian Wars)

So as the united States (13 sovereign states as addressed in the 1783 Treaty of Paris) came out of the War for Independence (officially called the American Revolution) and found themselves lied into the War of 1812. By 1815 the United States found themselves in more debt with NO MORE territory to show for it, it seems that maybe the government learned this lesson and stayed out of another war for another generation or so.

About the same time in current day Mexico, if you remember the Spanish Empire, specifically their fleet, was badly wrecked by the British in 1805 Battle of Trafalgar. By 1810 the Mexican people, sensing the demise of the Spanish Empire, started a revolution to expel the Spanish. So note that there was a lot of slave trade going on in Mexico with the Spanish kidnapping indigenous people’s kids and visa versa, so much so that the revolutionaries promised no slavery in the newly freed Mexico. Independence was achieved by 1821 at an 11 year war, but slavery remained .. so we have yet again the typical:

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss-The Who

Sound familiar, in recent years from Bush II to Obama to Trump … but I digress. Viva la no difference ..

Starting in 1822, settlers from Missouri (called the ‘Old 300’) started moving into the region that is now the state of Texas and by 1829 Mexico did finally abolish slavery. However, in 1830 Mexico outlawed immigration to Texas, yet it had no means to prevent this until starting in 1835 Texas went to war to become independent.

While the Republic of Texas occupied only 50% of what we today call Texas, this new government claimed an area three times this size into present day OK, CO, ID, UT and AZ. This “disputed land” was under the actual control of the Comanche, Apache and Navajo Indian tribes. These tribes had kept the Spanish Empire, Mexico and the Republic of Texas out of their land.

1st Republic of Texas flag
Republic of Texas naval flag

In 1845, the US government annexed Texas as the 28th state in the Union, complete with disputed land along the Rio Grande to the southern border with Mexico. The unwritten rules was that no troops were to be allowed in this “demilitarized zone”. However, the US was not content with Mexico alone as the Whigs wanted a more aggressive move against Canada while the Democrats wanted moves against a weak Mexico. Empire building is always in powerful elite’s DNA.

The term Manifest Destiny was the thought that God actually gave the US the right to seize land in the Northern Hemisphere from Atlantic to Pacific. The phrase heard from 1818 until 1846 was “54-40 or fight” based on the Whig premise that the joint claim the British Empire and US had over the Oregon Territory was in fact the US’s to possess. In fact, James Polk, a Democrat, even campaigned for president based on this philosophy.

This region west of the Rocky Mountains and between 42 degrees north and 54 degrees 40 minutes north (the southern boundary of Russia’s Alaska territory) included what now is Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, as well as land up the western coast of British Columbia, Canada.

The first action against Mexico was accomplished during the work towards a treaty behind the scenes between the British Empire (not in any major conflict and not a good time to pick a fight with) and the US Government. Pres. Polk sent Capt. Fremont with mercenaries to California to invade (1st invasion) and when Mexico got upset, he built a fort and raised a flag there. Mexican forces arrived and Fremont retreated to Northern California to operate a more guerilla war of attrition from the safety of the northern California woods. By this time, the Oregon Treaty was signed 15JUN1846 with the British Empire and settled the boundary to be the 49th parallel. The Whigs were ticked!

The Whigs now saw that conflict with Mexico might bring more southern “slave” states and upset the balance of power between the Whigs (Northern) and Democrats (Southern) had for decades. The slavery issue was USED by both parties to keep the people divided (the 1846 version of Covid-19). Polk then dispatched reps from his administration secretly to Mexico to offer them $25M for northern Mexico. The problem was that the Mexican government was in such a fluid and weak state that its leader changed 4x and its finance ministers 16X in the time the US sought to purchase this land. His representatives returned and Polk saw this as an opportunity to spark something. He directed 70 men under command of a man named Thorton to “patrol” (2nd Mexican invasion) Mexican territory and was met by 2000 Mexican cavalry. Over 16 US men were killed and Polk then addressed Congress saying “Mexico invaded the United States” which was an outright lie. Even Abraham Lincoln saw the ruse and challenged Polk from the floor of Congress by saying “show me the spot”.

BREAK: I have to say, the Anti-War Lincoln on the floor of Congress is like the Anti-War Obama on the same floor of Congress, only to become war hawks when they each became president. This is not unlike GW Bush campaigning on peace in 2000 and Trump campaigning on peace in 2016 only to see GW Bush invade Iraq based on the WMD lies and also see Trump dropping more bombs than O-bomb-a!

The 1846 Congress however gave in to President Polk’s wishes and the US invaded Mexico in an all out war that actually accomplished a few things:

  • US Army generals learned their craft of war
  • Whig party split at their peak which allowed a political vacuum for the Republican party
  • Deaths, disease all told by sending men into the tropics saw a 40% casualty rate
  • Failed to annex ALL of Mexico which set the stage for Lincoln’s War on the South
  • Sherman’s total war strategy was formed which was used in the South as well against the Comanche and Arapaho in the decades to come

The blind almost religion faith in the state causes untold casualties, deaths and financial destruction 360 degrees EXCEPT to the state itself .. because:

Now you know why school kids are never taught about this war. Because there were really no lies made to cover-up the real reason of this war except the president lying outright as to the location of the second Mexican invasion near the Rio Grande River.

Peace out.

-SF1

Total War and Unconditional Surrender: America’s Export to the World

If one were to believe the history books, the American Experience and Exceptionalism shone bright and clear from the effort and success to leave the British Empire to the rescue of Europe in WWI and WWII. Actual history shows that our exceptional export of ideas and character were not a rosy as the history books might paint.

There was a way that nations fought from the 1600s and into the 1700s that had been influenced by both Christianity as well as those who understood that war happened when politics failed, which meant that the people in general were caught in the middle of various power struggles in Europe. The American Revolution was fought mainly around large population centers usually having armies square up to each other in open fields and having at it. There were exceptions on both sides where military leaders like Banastre Tarleton and even some patriot militia would discard honorable warfare to achieve short-term military objectives, but in the end those tactics had their own “blowback”. The civilian sentiment played an important role in the way the effort for independence of each of the 13 states would play out before the British grew tired of the conflict and costs.

Even the War of 1812 was fought this way and the treaty signed a few years later involved both parties at the negotiation table just like what they did in Paris in 1783 after the American Revolutionary War. Once again, principles, honorable principles prevailed even when warfare was “in session”.

The War Against Southern Independence (called the American Civil War in US government history books) unveiled the inherit evil that is at the core of humans in a broken world. Driven by desperation, principles are cast aside in the effort to short-cut to a desired outcome.

The truth be known, the seven states that seceded actually took the high ground in formulating their reason for divorce with the federation. They knew that the US Constitution, the law of the land, was to be central in their rationale in desiring to exit, just like the 13 colonies did with England 80 years prior. Lawyer speak made these documents stress the way the slavery issue made the separation a necessity. The Constitution had allowed chattel slavery, and so the seven southern states made their case based on this “issue”.

In reality, the main issue was financial and economic in nature, but to prove that based on the Constitution would have been a tough fight. The southern region in general was the wealthiest in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was penned but by 1860 this region had seen their power be eclipsed by the North and the West (existing Midwest). Tariff revenue sources were a hot issue since the South bore the brunt of that expense. Additionally, this revenue funded not only the general government but also internal improvements, mainly in the northern states. Also, industries like the railroad and steel industry received corporate welfare at the expense of the southern businessmen. Additionally, southern plantations were financed by the Northeast elite bankers and until 1808 these same businessmen supplied the slave ships that would transport blacks rounded up by other blacks on the African continent to the United States and other areas in the Caribbean after it was illegal to do so in the US. The southern chattel slavery economic profitability was on the downward trend as most economists expected maybe 5-10 years left in this business model.

It should also be noted once more that Lincoln offered the seven southern states “perpetual legal slavery” via the proposed 13th amendment (Corwin Amendment) if they re-entered the union. Not one state considered that. They really wanted independence and all the risks that entailed instead of a continued marriage to the northern states. Even if it meant that run-away slaves making their way to the United States (all but those seven states that seceded) would indeed be free and not be required by law to be returned as the Fugitive Slave Act mandated. Most people in the North did NOT want ex-slaves fleeing north to take the lowest paying jobs, as even Lincoln feared this.

With that long introduction and setting of context, there was an article that brought to light (for me anyway) what this internal conflict offered to the world. A clip from it said:

So in a very literal sense the Civil War was the first World War. It not only created a powerful nation of organized resources and potential military might, but the greater world wars took their pattern from the American one, even to the trench system Lee set up at Petersburg .. What this country brought to Europe was unconditional surrender. The actual phrase was used by Roosevelt in the Second World War, but it was not his phrase. Grant had delivered it to the Confederate Command at Fort Donelson in February, 1862. Its implication is total surrender or total destruction, or slavery, or whatever. A strange alternative to be delivered by one Christian state to another; and yet it had precedent in Sherman’s harrying the lands of Mississippi and Georgia ..

U.S. (Unconditional Surrender) Grant or William Tecumseh (Total War) Sherman transitioned warfare to not only be brutal for military personnel and civilians in proximity, but also back to the way pre-Christian influenced empires operated, the slaughtering/slaving of the people in conquered lands.

The nineteenth century abandoned God officially, and the faith of Christian communicants was absorbed into the powerful western will; and this will set out, openly at last, to know and control not only nature but the universe. In the late stages of any society there is always the aging form and the formlessness of the new pistis, but this is no new faith; it is a perversion of faith, the final and open acceptance of Machiavelli’s science of politics, the politics whose end is absolute power, whose technique is reason without any theological restraint.

The transition from a republic that was a federation of states to a democracy that makes politics a god, will always keep evolving lower and lower in morality as the narcissist leaders practice power over principles.

Sherman said “War is Hell,” and by this he meant total war, openly carried out upon the civil population, with the shrewd understanding that if the source of supply was cut off, the armies would dwindle and perish.

This policy was then brought to the American Indians, then to the Spanish empire after Spain was falsely accused of blowing up the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba and to the Germans during WWI as well as the failure to include the Germans in the negotiated surrender, treating Germany like the North treated the South after the war with military districts, corrupt politics and the hatred of the people.

Yes, this part of the American “Exceptionalism” is rarely taught in schools or even in “approved” books. I would rather have American history taught in books like the authors of the Bible described the events of the Hebrew people, the nation Israel and the leaders of Jesus’ day .. communicating the good, the bad and the ugly.

Truth.

Truth-seekers these days have to expend a lot of effort to mine the accounts of days gone by, but it is written that “the truth shall set you free”

-SF1