Tag: Trump

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

The US Empire Has Blamed Other Nations in the Past, Wrongly, and Now Blames China?

A bully has to deflect any blame for anything and everything. One has to wonder it this is the proverbial blaming someone else before one gets blamed themselves, for something they actually did. First impressions are like that.

Lincoln knew if the South fired the first shot they would historically receive the blame for their peaceful secession that was spun to be an “insurrection”.

FDR knew if Japan struck first, he would get his ticket to join WWII which would hid his disastrous attempts at pulling the US out of the Great Depression with his New Deal programs ad nauseum.

Bush I knew Iraq would get the blame even though the US signaled to Saddam Hussein that it was his purview whether to invade Kuwait or not for infringing on Iraqi oil fields with horizontal drilling.

Bush II knew Iraq would get the blame after accusing them of WMDs.

Obama knew Libya would get the blame after accusing them of .. sorry, can’t even remember the excuse for turning Libya over to ISIS and other radical groups. Obama also tried this with Assad in Syria and that he used chemical weapons against his own people.

Now Trump, the GOP and the Democrats are all turning to blame China for ‘Rona. Seriously?

Yes, I call it ‘Rona since I ain’t following any government guidelines or laws that infringe on my NATURAL right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Just livin’ the life!

So Moon of Alabama has a pretty good article about the timeline that China had in sharing their own Covid-19 journey:

The U.S. claims that China did not inform it sufficiently. The timeline as published by China and confirmed by media reports does not support that claim.

On January 3 the head of the U.S. Center of Disease Control was personally informed by his Chinese counterpart that there was an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. On January 8 the “unknown cause” was identified as a novel coronavirus. A full genome sequence of the virus was published on January 12 and preliminary testing kits were developed and made available in Wuhan. By January 13 another test and test protocol had been developed in Germany and on January 17 the WHO adopted its refined version.

In the U.S. the CDC insisted on developing its own test and failed by contaminating its test components. It then failed for more than a month to correct the issue.

When you point a finger at someone else, you have to realize that you have three other fingers pointing at yourself! However, American Exceptionalism keeps the blinders on as to the US’s stupid decisions at every turn of this pandemic turned plan-demic.

The whole blame game smells fishy as it becomes apparent that the wet market in Wuhan was not the source of the epidemic. For one, it did not and does not sell bats. Another point is that the epidemic started in December at a time when bats hibernate. The first know case was not related to the market at all.

As far as a lab source to this bat-sourced theory:

Edward Holmes, a biologist at the University of Sydney and a fellow of the respected Royal Society in London, said the Wuhan laboratory blamed by some for the pandemic does have specimens of the bat virus RaTG13, the closest relative of Covid-19 source SARS-CoV-2, but the two are not genetically linked.

RaTG13 strains, he says, are from the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, not the central city of Wuhan, the pandemic’s initial epicenter.

Genome tracing has revealed that the bat virus RaTG13 has at least 20 years of genetic divergence, or evolutionary change, from SARS-CoV-2, and possibly as much as 50 years, ruling it out as the source of the pandemic.

OK then. What is it that the US wants. You know whenever there is COOPERATION across the political aisle from Democrats and GOP, there is some stupid agenda going on as Democrats are evil, GOP are stupid and together they are STUPID to the 2nd power.

1. Financial: I am pretty sure since the US has chosen the path of financial self destruction to cover their own super sick financial fundamentals and a QE hell that they could never exit without saving face, this Covid-19 became a convenient camouflage. The US wants to keep China on its heals as the US fire-sale domestically heats up and Chinese investors come looking for good deals.

2. Military: I am pretty sure with all the Covid-19 infected aircraft carriers and nuclear bomber fleets are heading back to the US mainland which leaves China to do what they want in the South China Sea, and the Pentagon is not happy about that but its hands are tied between that and exiting bases in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

We can call this a lame pre-emptive strike in order for the US Empire to stay in the world stage without looking like it is no longer empire material.

The obvious solution is to do this financial reset is not to bailout corporate America, but to do the hard work of moving through bankruptcies WHILE drastically paring down federal government giving responsibilities back to the states and recall the military from their global outposts to the United States mainland. The core piece of this is the removal of the central bank, the FED, as this has allowed the United States to live well beyond its means ($25T debt and $250T unfunded liabilities) and enslave the generations to come.

Will our existing political class figure this out? Not a chance.

Will voting help? Not a chance.

The US still has the USPS and Amtrak, if they can be trusted with little things, you can safely say they can’t be trusted with MAJOR things.

This nation will have to split into many smaller republics before any of this can be addressed.

Whoever can be trusted with small things can also be trusted with big things. Whoever is dishonest in little things will be dishonest in big things too. – Luke 16:10 (Bible)

Peace out.

-SF1

 

Is Trump To Follow in Lincoln’s Footsteps? – Stay Tuned!

The Articles of Confederation, which had the word “perpetual” in it, was cast aside in replacing it with the US Constitution in 1787. Prophetic Patrick Henry said:

I smell a rat.

Yes, and with that move the United States began a constant assault on the personal liberties and freedoms the Declaration of Independence declared.

While George Washington himself allowed crisis to over-rule the Law of the Land (i.e. US Constitution), no one did it in a bigger way (to date) than Abraham Lincoln. All it took was for the state of Virginia to change its mind on secession after Lincoln decided to call up 75,000 volunteer troops to “suppress the rebellion” (actually, the peaceful departure of seven southern states of the Deep South). Washington DC was then faced, literally, with a land now belonging to the Confederate States of America across the Potomac River. In response to this development, the thought of Maryland also seceding had Lincoln and his cabinet in panic from consequences of THEIR OWN actions. Potential peace negotiators had attempted to meet with Lincoln and his leadership all during March 1861 but Lincoln refused that peace could be a viable option, for the “union”. He simply would not settle for a divorce from seven states that had been abused by the union for decades, and decided to get that spouse “back in the trailer”.

Can we do something different than Lincoln’s violent response to a divided country where at the end of Lincoln’s war, 2.5% of the population perished? (750,000 by 1865, 7 million in 2020) I highly doubt President Trump would allow the following to happen .. to allow the regions to heal better from the current ECONOMIC crisis disguised as a health crisis:

.. we will see. I think he is pure Lincoln material unfortunately.

Back to Lincoln and what he faced in late April 1861 .. James Dueholm paints the picture in this article:

27April 1861:

Lincoln issued an order to General Winfield Scott authorizing him to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, at or near any military line between Philadelphia and Washington if the public safety required it.  Lincoln issued his order pursuant to the provision in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution stating that “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion and invasion the public safety may require it,”

A writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody. A habeas corpus petition is a petition filed with a court by a person who objects to his own or another’s imprisonment.

Laurence M. Vance explains:

The origins of what Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase called “the most important human right in the Constitution … the best and only sufficient defense of personal freedom,” go back to the Magna Carta: “No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised [seized] or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” (Magna Carta, sec. 39). The English Petition of Right (1628) and Habeas Corpus Act (1679), as well as our own Constitution and The Judiciary Act of 1789 (which established the detailed organization of the federal judiciary), all mention this “fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action” (Justice Abe Fortas).

One problem with the way Lincoln pulled this off, it was Congress that was supposed to do this, and Congress would not be called into session until 04JUL1861 by Lincoln!

Lincoln had decided on 15APR1861 to delay calling Congress to order until the 4th of July so that the war on the insurrection could already have gained enough momentum and that the official narrative could have taken hold in the hearts and minds of the people in the north and west (Midwest) United States.

25May1861:

On May 25, federal troops arrested John Merryman in Cockeysville, Maryland, for recruiting, training, and leading a drill company for Confederate service. Merryman’s lawyer promptly petitioned Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, sitting as a trial judge, for a writ of habeas corpus. This writ, sometimes called the Great Writ, is a judicial writ addressed to a jailer ordering him to come to court with his prisoner and explain why the prisoner is being held.

Following a hearing in the matter, Taney ordered delivery of a writ of habeas corpus to General George Cadwallader directing him to appear before Taney on May 28 with Merryman in tow. After Cadwallader refused service of the writ, Taney ruled on May 28 that the president did not have the power to suspend the writ, and Taney announced that he later would issue an opinion in support of his ruling.

Several days later, Taney issued his opinion. Only Congress, he said, could suspend the writ of habeas corpus. He observed that the limitation on suspension of the writ appeared in Article I of the Constitution, dealing with legislative powers, not in Article II, which established executive power. He explored the history of the writ of habeas corpus under English law, showing that the House of Commons had limited and then abolished the royal power to suspend the writ, leaving suspension in legislative hands. The Constitution, he said, embodied this English tradition. Article II, he asserted, gave the president very limited powers that were weakened further by the Bill of Rights. Finally, he cited eminent authority, noting that Chief Justice John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, and Joseph Story, a luminary as both judge and scholar, had all acknowledged that the power to suspend was a congressional power.

Lincoln’s reaction, in October of 1861 Lincoln ordered the District of Columbia Provost Marshal to place armed sentries around the home of a Washington, D.C. Circuit Court judge and place him under house arrest. The reason was that the judge had issued a writ of habeas corpus to a young man being detained by the Provost Marshal, allowing the man to have due process. By placing the judge under house arrest Lincoln prevented the judge from attending the hearing of the case.

Chief Justice Taney

After the fact, in 1863, Congress finally caught up with Lincoln’s violation of the Constitution and covered for their dictator:

Congress did not enact legislation authorizing suspension of habeas corpus until March 3, 1863. In the meantime, Lincoln’s 1861 orders authorizing suspension remained in force, and on September 24, 1862, he issued a proclamation imposing martial law and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. The proclamation orders that, for the rest of the war, (i) “all rebels and insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid or comfort to rebels against the authority of the United States, shall be subject to martial law and liable to trial and punishment by courts martial or military commission,” and (ii) “the writ of habeas corpus is suspended in respect to all persons arrested or imprisoned in any fort, camp, arsenal, military prison, or other place of confinement by any military authority or by the sentence of any court martial or military commission.”

Lincoln’s response to an obedient Congress:

“You ask … whether I really claim that I may override all the guarantied rights of individuals, on the plea of conserving the public safety—when I may choose to say the public safety requires it. This question, divested of the phraseology calculated to represent me as struggling for an arbitrary personal prerogative, is either simply a question who shall decide, or an affirmation that nobody shall decide, what the public safety does require, in cases of rebellion or invasion. The constitution contemplates the question as likely to occur for decision, but it does not expressly declare who is to decide it. By necessary implication, when rebellion or invasion comes, the decision is to be made, from time to time; and I think the man whom, for the time, the people have, under the constitution, made the commander-in-chief, of their Army and Navy, is the man who holds the power….”

So this arrogant and pompous President, actually, a dictator at this point, said “public safety” in the middle of this crisis mandated that SOMEONE decides to remove the writ of habeas corpus.

Can you see Trump saying this? Yes you can! If you are honest with yourself.

Think about it.

Stay tuned!

-SF1

Safe Place: When a Nation is Triggered in Thinking National Security is at Risk

Whether it be a nation or an empire, leaders always know that the fear card can produce unity and an excuse to utilize totalitarian measures against their own people, and the masses will love it, because the feels.

In reading about why the CIA and FBI saw threats with both JFK’s and MLK’s trajectories. Jacob Hornberger states:

Why did they target Kennedy? For the same reason they targeted all those other people for assassination — they concluded that Kennedy had become a grave threat to national security and, they believed, it was their job to eliminate threats to national security.

It has to sound familiar, especially over the past few years and the Russian threats due to Trump’s ‘friendly’ attitude to Russia (as he ramps up the sanctions, sending missiles to bases in Syria that Russian troops are based, etc.). Give me a break.

Although the article specifically attributes these actions as starting after WWII as the OSS operations were then made permanent by Truman’s creation of the CIA, the very psychological mechanism of fear has been a real thing in America since the colonial days.

It was the fear of American Indian raids that had independent and autonomous farmers in the colonies agree to pay takes to raise an army to remove those threats. It was the fear of a free trade zone in the southern United States in 1861 that prompted the northern politicians to “put down the insurrection” in a way that forever altered the US government to be highly centralized and a source of significant tyranny. Many southern states were subject to 12 years of military rule that not only wrecked the south economically, but revealed the desperate measures this totalitarian US government would take to keep itself “safe”.

By the 1890s this fear extended to the world for the US government, using the USS Maine incident in Havana harbor to make war with the failing Spanish Empire and seize lands around the world. By 1918, the progressive thought that the US was to be a power for “good” in this world, to keep the world safe made the people accept that sending millions of men overseas to die in France in WWI “worth it all”. Even Franklin Roosevelt knew that the end game of war was the only way to maintain his and his political party’s power, and used deceptive embargoes and tariffs to manipulate the Japanese Empire to lash out predictably allowing the US to enter WWII.

It was after this war that included the US immorally using nuclear bombs against primarily civilian populations that had little strategic military value that the US added yet another immoral weapon in their suite of tools to keep the world safe for democracy. Assassination. How totalitarian, how Communist!

The US using tactics that their “evil” enemies use are ever apparent these days when it can be argued that the US is the largest exporter of terrorism in the 21st century. It is no accident that securing the largest opium producing area in the world to secretly fund the CIA might be what keeps the politicians in line, with drug money ..

But I digress.

I guess the point of all this is to show how the US has developed into the very totalitarian state that it was fighting against in WWII. In Jacob’s article it points out that the way the nation/empire fights abroad always comes home. The domestic “fight” to retain power will start to use tactics that were only used in “war” or in classified CIA operations:

State-sponsored assassinations to protect national security were among the dark-side practices that began to be utilized after the federal government was converted into a national-security state. As early as 1953, the CIA was developing a formal assassination manual that trained its agents in the art of assassination and, equally important, in the art of concealing the CIA’s role in state-sponsored assassinations.

In 1954, the CIA targeted the democratically elected president of Guatemala for assassination because he was reaching out to Russia in a spirt of peace, friendship, and mutual co-existence. In 1960-61, the CIA conspired to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the head of the Congo because he was perceived to be a threat to U.S. national security.

So inside of a decade, the CIA developed the tools that the FBI could assist them with in these domestic threats ..

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy achieved a breakthrough that enabled him to recognize that the Cold War was just one great big racket for the national-security establishment and its army of “defense” contractors and sub-contractors.

That’s when JFK announced an end to the Cold War and began reaching out to the Soviets and the Cubans in a spirit of peace, friendship, and mutual coexistence. Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University on June 10, 1963, where he announced his intent to end the Cold War and normalize relations with the communist world, sealed President Kennedy’s fate.

This deep state action over 50 years ago has served to keep a reign on US presidents ever since. This also was extended to other leaders that threatened the deep state:

… one day after his Peace Speech at American University, Kennedy delivered a major televised address to the nation defending the civil rights movement, the movement that King was leading.

What better proof of a threat to national security than that — reaching out to the communist world in peace and friendship and then, one day later, defending a movement that the U.S. national-security establishment was convinced was a spearhead for the communist takeover of the United States?

You now know why US media is the lapdog for deep state propaganda, to keep the narrative alive that the US is perpetually fighting terror and fighting to keep itself and the world safe while the US government has developed a ..:

… totalitarian-like governmental structure that has led our nation in the direction of state-sponsored assassinations, torture, invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, coups, alliances with dictatorial regimes, sanctions, embargoes, regime-change operations, and massive death, suffering, and destruction, not to mention the loss of liberty and privacy here at home.

No one should be surprised here in 2020 when we can see clearly how things are done, especially with Soleimani’s assassination.

The US has evolved into the very thing it was created to avoid.

The illusion of safety remains, but the reality of despotism is already here.

-SF1

US Civil War #2? No, Civil War #1 was Not a Civil War

I am a detail person. I love properly defined words. Governments and their historians twist words to favor their own agenda. This is why the secession of 7 and then 11 united States AND the resulting conflict for four horrible years is labeled a “civil” war.

What is hilarious is that Lincoln, knowing that secession was legal since he considered it during and even ten years after the Mexican-American War when he said:

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. – Abraham Lincoln, Peoria, Ill., Oct. 16, 1854

So when seven states, each, like an abused spouse, decided to cancel the voluntary contract she had entered into and go her own way, Lincoln decided to call this an “insurrection”.

Evidence is to the contrary however, as people today compare what happened in 1860 after Lincoln’s election:

Yes, there is a civil war looming in the United States. But it will not look like the orderly pattern of descent which characterized the conflict of 1861-65. It will appear more like the Yugoslavia break-up, or the Russian and Chinese civil wars of the 20th Century. – By Gregory R. Copley – Aug 19, 2017

The secession of whole states via legal means was the American patriots of the time effort to make the whole thing “above board”, “by the book” and “in accordance with the laws of the land”. We now know that Lincoln at the outset was not going to let that happen without a fight. It took the first month that he was in office to whip up the worst fears of life for the remaining 27 united States without the Deep South states. Economically, it looked real bad as the Northern economy and Western (Midwest) farmers would potentially lose their closest customers who in FEB1861 voted to become a relative “free trade zone” compared to the US’s 20%+ average tariff rate by setting tariffs at approximately at 13% on average.

A close inspection of Lincoln’s inaugural address (04MAR1861), two days after the US Congress passed a tariff increase (which the Republicans wanted and was in their platform) shows that ..

1. –  if you can believe Lincoln’s words, he was not going to do anything about slavery:

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

2. – Lincoln’s primary interest lay in collecting duties at all southern ports, as the US general government wanted and needed this revenue stream:

.. there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.

Lincoln contended that divorce was not an option. Of course he “saw” the nation as a singular, and that union was paramount. However, in history we have seen peaceful secession work many times. Lincoln, who once thought and said that governing requires consent of the governed, changed his mind.

Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.

Properly conceived, the United States in 1861 was actually like polygamy, in that 34 spouses were involved, and 7 wanted to leave this arrangement:

This was NOT the 7 spouses wanting to rule over the WHOLE harem! That would be the true definition of civil war, where the winner gets EVERYTHING!

So in hindsight, the American Revolution was in fact 13 spouses wanting to rule their own households, so basically 13 civil wars as in each colony there was a mix of Tory/Loyalist and Whig/Rebel tendencies plus those that didn’t really care and just wanted peace at all cost.

The American Civil War was not really a civil war as after Lincoln called up 75,000 volunteer troops from the remaining 27 states, 4 of those said no way (Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia) as each of these had already voted once to stay in the union and now voted to leave.

This brings us to 2019. Are we facing a civil war? Again, I contend that most decent people want to be left alone. Most decent people don’t mind if the east coast from DC to MA and the west coast from CA to WA just leave (or stay and the rest of the states leave). Again, Gregory R. Copley shares:

It may, in other words, be short-lived simply because the uprising will probably not be based upon the decisions of constituent states (which, in the US Civil War, created a break-away confederacy), acting within their own perception of a legal process. It is more probable that the 21st Century event would contage as a gradual breakdown of law and order.

I tend to agree with this synopsis as the states are no longer entities with any autonomy, but are puppets of the federal government these days, a direct result of the union forcing the marriage covenant to be permanent.

Many will point to Trump or Brexit as the start of this so-called Civil War 2.0, but like most wars, their roots go back years if not generations:

It is significant that the gathering crisis in the United States was not precipitated by the November 7, 2016, election of Pres. Donald Trump, and neither was the growing polarization of the United Kingdom’s society caused by the Brexit vote of 2016. In both instances, the election of Mr Trump and the decision by UK voters for Britain to exit the European Union were late reactions — perhaps too late — by the regional populations of both countries to what they perceived as the destruction of their nation-states by “urban super-oligarchies”.

The last-ditch reactions by those who voted in the US for Donald Trump and those who voted in the UK for Brexit were against an urban-based globalism which has been building for some seven decades, with the deliberate or accidental intent of destroying nations and nationalism.

I contend that the roots of this go much further back than seven decades, but back to the very end of Amerexit, when the thirteen colonies each received acknowledgement in the 1783 Treaty of Paris that the British Empire would let them go in peace, finally. In the post war era, those former patriots would once again turn on the people to assemble a central government that would “protect” them, at a cost when in fact it was a guerilla war that actually freed the colonies from the British grip.

The myth abounded that formal confederation was necessary to win the war, although the war would be virtually won by the time confederation was finally achieved. The war was fought and won by the states informally but effectively united in a Continental Congress; fundamental decisions, such as independence, had to be ratified by every state. There was no particular need for the formal trappings and permanent investing of a centralized government, even for victory in war. Ironically, the radicals were reluctantly pulled into an arrangement which they believed would wither away at the end of the war, and thereby helped to forge an instrument which would be riveted upon the people only in time of peace, an instrument that proved to be a halfway house to that archenemy of the radical cause, the Constitution of the United States. – Murray Rothbard in ‘Conceived in Liberty Vol IV p.243

It is both sick and sad that even radical patriots turned back to central government as the safe way forward. Allowing the smaller states to work in a loose confederation would have provided a true “land of the free” much more than our tyrannical US Empire has allowed us domestically.

As the fictional Benjamin Martin said at the close of the movie The Patriot (2000)

“With the war ending .. I take measure of what we have lost. And what we have won.”

What was won was colonial-centric liberty and freedom from British Empire oppression, what was soon lost was that very same thing. Squandered, politics has a way of doing that every time.

-SF1