Lebanese ‘Vision for Peace’ for a brighter future for the people in North America
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
The Who – “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
By now, one has to understand that it really makes no difference who is president, except for maybe if one has the gift of eloquent speech, another a gift of making it to 3rd base with an intern, another a gift of “duh” while targeting countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, another the gift of racial equality and finally a politician that can create tweets on Twitter and trigger millions. We sure have made “progress”.
However, in the real world, the US Empire has been marching on from CIA assassinating other nation’s democratically elected presidents (1953, Iran) to open US military assassination of other nation’s #2 national leader and hero from his strategy to defeat ISIS (2020, Iran), nothing has halted the evil empire’s advance. Yes, I agree with Oliver Stone that the evil of the USSR in the 1980s has been replaced by the US Empire of the 2000s and beyond.
Things have changed a lot since then, at least for Stone. “Empires fall. Let’s pray that this empire, these evil things… because we are the evil empire,” he said in an interview to RT. “What Reagan said about Russia is true about us.” – Sputnik / Alexei Druzhinin
To get a real picture of what has evolved in the Middle East and how we (US Empire) are not helping, I believe that Eric Margolis’ experience is something that can be drawn on as a starting point where one can research for themselves from there. In his latest piece picked up by the Ron Paul Institute from Lew Rockwell, called “Grand Theft Property”, Eric outlines how this latest Trump “Peace Plan” is nothing more than continued theft of Palestinian land that will only serve to ensure continued violence in the region that the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) will love so that their profits are assured. Eric explains:
As they ask in my native New York City, “Is it good for the Jews?”, the answer is a resounding no! The Trump-Bibi theft of ancestral Arab lands condemns Arabs and Jews to another five decades of violence and hatred. The Promised Land was not supposed to be like this.
Ain’t that the truth. The fact is, visions do not create rights. They have no legal grounds. They do not convey legality to anything.
Don’t go away, for the backstory is even better. One needs to know the context and history that brought us to this point where it seems to be accepted that Israel and the US can decide how to partition up the Middle East:
In 1916, as World War I raged on, a British diplomat, Mark Sykes, met with his French counterpart from the Quai d’Orsay, Monsieur Picot, and signed an agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire once victory was achieved.
The heart of the Mideast – Palestine, Syria, and Iraq – was divided between Britain and France. Italy and Russia were offered other Ottoman lands: southern Turkey was promised to Italy and Constantinople to Russia. All this was top secret but was later revealed by the Bolsheviks after their 1917 revolution.
Do you see this? World powers, the empires, can just decide where to draw the lines, the benefits of wars go to the state while the cost of war is the burden that those who fought and sometimes died along with their families and the innocent civilians caught up in these great conflicts where life is never the same.
I have heard the term that bigger is better, however, when it comes to states, the bigger the state they more tyrannical they can be. This tyranny extends from the politicians who enable the state and give the state legitimacy, because politicians were “voted” in, all the way to all the people who follow orders blindly, from CIA assets, to the military all the way to the police, from the capital, to the states all the way to the local governments that are dependent on federal funding.
I agree with G.K. Chesterton who said:
“The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”
That kind of local government could easily have prevented the following:
70 million killed in China
60 million killed in USSR
4 million killed in Cambodia
5 million killed in North Korea
1 million killed in Yugoslavia
1 million killed in Ethiopia
1 million killed in Indonesia
800,000 killed in Rwanda
800,000 killed in US Civil War
Anyway, it appears that the US Empire train, similar to the USSR and Roman ones before it, will continue on down this track until it self destructs, no matter who is the president.
Adrift in a sea of feelings is where this country’s society is now. Principles do not matter, faith does not matter, it is most about what we can get for little or no effort or how can we feel safe both physically and emotionally.
A society like this should expect to be slaves, good compliant tax slaves on the government plantation. The elites love this.
In light of the approaching celebration of what was called Armistice Day, since WWII called Veterans Day, it is worth revisiting what some of the founders KNEW as a result of their own experiences:
A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.- James Madison
From a 2005 post by Jacob Hornsberger, he rightly predicts what our future holds:
Imagine that the president issues the following grave announcement on national television during prime time: “Our nation has come under another terrorist attack. Our freedoms and our national security are at stake. I have issued orders to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to immediately take into custody some 1,000 American terrorists who have been identified by the FBI as having conspired to commit this dastardly attack or who have given aid and comfort to the enemy. I have also ordered the JCS to take all necessary steps to temporarily confiscate weapons in the areas where these terrorists are believed to be hiding. These weapons will be returned to the owners once the terrorist threat has subsided. I am calling on all Americans to support the troops in these endeavors, just as you are supporting them in their fight against terrorism in Iraq. We will survive. We will prevail. God bless America.”
Now ask yourself: How many of the troops would disobey the orders of the president given those circumstances, especially if panicked and terrified Americans and the mainstream press were endorsing his martial-law orders?
The answer: Almost none would disobey. They would not consider it their job to determine the constitutionality of the president’s orders. They would leave that for the courts to decide. Their professional allegiance and loyalty to their supreme commander in chief would trump all other considerations, including their oath to “support and defend the Constitution.”
Therefore, if the federal government is the primary threat to our freedom, then so are the troops: their unswerving loyalty to their commander in chief makes them the primary instrument by which the federal government is able to destroy or infringe the rights and freedoms of the citizenry.
Jacob also offers a solution, one that will never be taken seriously since our trust as a society is in government and not in the founding father’s Providence:
There is one — and only one — solution to this threat to our freedoms and well-being: for the American people to heed the warning of our Founding Fathers against standing armies before it is too late, and to do what should have been done at least 15 years ago: dismantle the U.S. military empire, close all overseas bases, and bring all the troops home, discharging them into the private sector, where they would effectively become “Citizen-soldiers” — well-trained citizens prepared to rally to the defense of our nation in the unlikely event of a foreign invasion of our country. And for the American people to heed the warning of President Eisenhower against the military-industrial complex, by shutting down the Pentagon’s enormous domestic military empire, closing domestic bases, and discharging those troops into the private sector.
How will our society ever have a faith that could help them have hope while being attacked by a foreign empire? More importantly, how did the founders and militias have such faith in the 1770s?
What remains to be seen is how of if the various parts of American society can once again trust God instead of government for a free future. I guess time will tell.
I guess it may be the curse of anyone having the “bent”, or the DNA, to see, in my mind, ahead. This is a kind of forth-telling instead of fore-telling. I do not believe that I can predict the future, but I tend to have a sense of how things might be trending.
In a previous post, I lamented about the type of people who coped with seasons of crisis. Here is a quote:
The character to stand up to tyranny when ones own family and way of life could be swept away like that of Job in the Old Testament of the Bible is something that was not seen in these united States since the War for Independence 80 years earlier when the same kind of people stood up to the British Empire.
A man or woman of honor were people, who in times of crisis, rose to the occasion and became unwilling leaders in their efforts to repel the forces of change that represented a foe who’s agenda was to implement their own life view on others, with force. Honor was a sought after attribute especially in the South in the decades after the War for Independence, and by the 1930s had all been but overshadowed by something new ..
If one can imagine being in the Southern United States in 1860, reading the newspapers or hearing the winds of war. Similar to being in the Northern American Colonies in 1775, or in the Southern American Colonies in 1780 after the fall of Charleston, South Carolina, everything changes in a matter of days.
Society is turned upside-down when politics fail and warfare breaks out or economic warfare spreads as in places like Venezuela. The country’s infrastructure fails, the transportation of foods cease and deprivation spreads.
While I could “prepper-talk” y’all into stocking up on ammo, food stores and water, and encourage y’all to get into shape walking with your bug-out-bag for miles several days in a row, I do think the most important way to prepare for possible disaster scenarios is within one’s own mind and then educating others on the philosophical and psychological aspects of what might come down the pike. The other things can then fall into pace in their own time.
I have followed “The Woodpile Report” for a time but found myself fascinated in the latest post about the centrality of food in our daily lives. As the author would put it:
Calories are life.
Short and to the point. I guess that is what I like about this author even though there are many points we might not be in total agreement with. One has to be able to sift it to extract the precious jewel. Truth is not always self evident. Sometimes one is blind to it 🙂
So in this post, the author points out various times in recent history where food itself was weaponized:
[Union Gerneral] Sherman’s “scorched earth” campaign began on November 15th [1864] when he cut the last telegraph wire that linked him to his superiors in the North. He left Atlanta in flames and pointed his army south. No word would be heard from him for the next five weeks. Unbeknownst to his enemy, Sherman’s objective was the port of Savannah. His army of 65,000 cut a broad swath as it lumbered towards its destination. Plantations were burned, crops destroyed and stores of food pillaged.
The plight of both black and white in the South were of little concern for the armies as they march through this conquered land. It took over 100 years for this region to recover.
The War Orders given by the [British] Admiralty on 26 August 1914 were clear enough. All food consigned to Germany through neutral ports was to be captured and all food consigned to Rotterdam was to be presumed consigned to Germany. The British were determined on the starvation policy, whether or not it was lawful. The average daily diet of 1,000 calories was insufficient to maintain a good standard of health, resulting by 1917 in widespread disorders caused by malnutrition such as scurvy, tuberculosis, and dysentery. In December 1918, the National Health Office in Berlin [Germany] calculated that 763,000 persons had died as a result of the blockade by that time.
Berlin 1919 – Food Riot Strikes a Butcher Shop
Again, bringing the effects of war to the innocent civilians was something that the 20th century seems to have learned from the 19th century from the War Against Southern Independence in the Americas from 1861-1865.
In September 1944, trains in the Netherlands ground to a halt. Dutch railway workers were hoping that a strike could stop the transport of Nazi troops, helping the advancing Allied forces. But the Allied campaign failed, and the Nazis punished the Netherlands by blocking food supplies, plunging much of the country into famine. By the time the Netherlands was liberated in May 1945, more than 20,000 people had died of starvation.
Famine in Netherlands During WWII
It is apparent that Americans, British and even Germans would cross that moral line to punish the innocent to expedite their own war agendas.
The problem [in Japan] was not just harvests and the cutting off imports, transportation problems developed. Fuel shortages made it increasingly difficult getting food from the countryside into the cities. Food Shortages had begun to appear in some parts of the country even before Pearl Harbor. By 1944 theft of produce still in the fields led police to speak of a new class of “vegetable thieves” and the new crime of “field vandalizing”. The average calorie intake per person had by late 1945 declined to far less than deemed necessary even for an individual engaged in light work.
In this case, this is a nation which is not able to facilitate, via transportation, feeding their own civilian population due primarily to USA embargoes waged in the year BEFORE Pearl Harbor in late 1940! The United States utilized economic warfare to force a conflict in the Pacific to justify joining the United Kingdom and France in their fight during WWII:
The [07OCT1940] memo [declassified in 1994], scanned below, detailed an eight step plan to provoke Japan into attacking the United States. President Roosevelt, over the course of 1941, implemented all 8 of the recommendations contained in the McCollum memo. Following the eighth provocation, Japan attacked. The public was told that it was a complete surprise, an “intelligence failure”, and America entered World War Two.
In summary, the Woodpile Report’s emphasis on the war and food connection:
Wars are generally about food. Ancient Rome imported its food and fought epic wars to develop new sources and keep the ones it had. Medieval fiefdoms were agricultural enterprises, raiding their neighbors was common. The westward expansion of America in the nineteenth century was about food and the means to move it, as was Japan’s expanding empire in the early twentieth century. Germany explicitly cited food production to justify its aggression in the east. Their rants about fighting Bolshevism was pep rally stuff, Nazism itself was excessively patriotic Marxism.
Bingo! Just know in a potential “civil war” season in the domestic United States, where civil unrest is sparked in the metro areas first:
Seizing the nation’s food would be an obvious move. Expect them to deploy troops to secure big ag and the necessary transportation facilities, destroy anyone who got in their way and terrorize potential troublemakers.
Most ‘preppers’ suggest a year or two of food supplies without resupply. I am pretty sure a vast majority of Americans (including myself) have not accomplished this in preparation for what may happen, or may not happen in the continental United States in the next 2-10 years. The Woodpile Report’s author also contends that the footprint suited for a sustained protected food supply system needs to be very small:
Well placed and practiced survivalists could get by on a onesey-twosey basis. Two may survive where one wouldn’t. Three or four may be better, assuming an adequate reserve of food and supplies. With more than four the liabilities are likely to outweigh the advantages. It assumes the deepest of deep larders, extensive supplies and harmonious wisdom in all things. Unless each make an irreplaceable contribution of critical value it’s probably too big a footprint for this phase. Loosely allying with similar small groups for mutual benefit may be the better choice. Five or more is a crowd, a danger to itself.
“Harmonious wisdom”, probably something that is in every increasingly short supply as the clock tics and the pages of the calendar turns. I was just lamenting today how the talents of previous generations were not passed on to mine, how my wife’s grandmother could properly field dress a deer, and filet a fish. These things, taken for granted just 50 years ago are now a rare skill unless one lives primarily in rural areas. It is no wonder that the odds are stacked economically against these areas by our own government, we don’t want people to be too self sufficient now do we?
The ruling class would continue to work against middle America’s existence. As said above, they’d confiscate local stores of food on a continuing basis, seize major food producing areas intact and grab the needed transportation facilities. Make no mistake, their hirelings would be granted license for absolute ruthlessness. Free fire zones and minefields are not off the table. Skilled labor, if otherwise unwilling, would be arrested and compelled to work.
FEMA camps would lure people who get hungry, removing the more compliant and complacent from the land so that their responsibility could end for these land areas that can then be deemed “no-go” zones where military can sweep up any resistance with any method at their disposal.
Feeding their base would guarantee the loyalty of supporters, inflict mass death on the deplorables by ‘no cost’ neglect and keep armed confrontation largely confined to flyover country.
While portions of the “fly-over” country would be retained as the source of food items for those that remain, first those connected to the government (military, police, HSA, etc.), large swaths of today’s farmland would not be needed IMHO. Importing food items to supply the east and west coasts might be all that is needed to retain control.
Privation, disease, hunger, murderous chaos and high intensity combat would likely peak in the second year. This is the knothole which would separate the survivalists from dabblers and hopeful idealists.
Thinning of the herd. Everything will have changed, and for those that remain, it will be, or would be a strange new world, if all this comes to fruition.
The author ends on a note of encouragement, that no matter when or if this crisis emerges, one needs to count the cost:
Be a survivor. The who and what of a civil war would matter only occasionally. Food would matter every hour of every week. Stack food high, wide and deep where it’s secure from looters and confiscation. Backup your stash with an “iron rations” fallback stash. Stack seeds, garden tools, fishing and hunting gear to be prepared for self-resupply opportunities.
I will have to be honest and say, while I thought about these things when I left the US Navy in the early 1980s, the sheer effort to raise a family and to provide for their daily needs overshadowed my own ability to prepare for what seems to be coming down the pike.
With the events that have unfolded so far in the 21st century, I do believe that the priority to plan and strategize is upon us all. The economic trajectory this country is on is not sustainable. The US Empires days are numbered, but as with most empires, this could take years or decades. Only God knows the timing.
Finally, I also have to admit that I have failed. Here is what I wrote last year:
[During Hurricane Sandy in 2012] Sotelo also said Blackhawk helicopters patrol the skies “all day and night” and a black car with tinted windows surveys the camp while the government moves heavy equipment past the tents at night. Reporters were not allowed in the fenced complex or “FEMA camp” to report on conditions either, where lines of displaced residents formed outside portable toilets. Security guards were posted at every door, and residents could not even use the toilet or shower without first presenting an I.D. to a government official.
Yes, this is standard protocol .. and many will have no options should this day come. It might not hurt your future, your kid’s future or your grandkid’s future to think about a plan B sometime in the near term. At worst case you never use it .. best case it may save your family from government abuse or worse .. Personal goal by the end of 2018: Own a Plan B
I have no Plan B here near the end of 2019. Have I squandered my time? Will I regret my lack of planning in the years to come? (Can anyone else related?)
I guess time will tell, and that the very act of looking at my words from many months ago help to convict my heart that something has to change in the next year.
I guess I was on track in June 2019 when I wrote “Preparing (Prepping?) the Next Generation with Love” in this post, but I am not sure I heeded my own advice.
Anyone who attended public school in the last 100 years have been taught that the US Constitution was one of the milestones in this country’s birth and maturation process towards being and becoming the land of the free.
This is rubbish. Americans were more free in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris than they were after the US Constitution was revealed on 17SEP1787 and finally ratified by 11 of the 13 former colonies two years later in 1789.
This book challenges the assumption that the Constitution was a landmark in the struggle for liberty. Instead, Sheldon Richman argues, it was the product of a counter-revolution, a setback for the radicalism represented by America’s break with the British empire. Drawing on careful, credible historical scholarship and contemporary political analysis, Richman suggests that this counter-revolution was the work of conservatives who sought a nation of “power, consequence, and grandeur.” America’s Counter-Revolution makes a persuasive case that the Constitution was a victory not for liberty but for the agendas and interests of a militaristic, aristocratic, privilege-seeking ruling class.
Personally, way back in MAR1976 when I was a high school senior and 17 years old, I made the oath below:
“I, (state name of enlistee), do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
Enlisting in the US Navy, I had little to no idea as to the words I was repeating. At that time I was not aware how defective the Constitution was, the way it was created (the charge in 1787 was to amend the Articles of Confederation, not to replace it) and the way it has been abused.
Note that my first charge in this oath I took is to support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. So what if the President of the US is that enemy, how can I still “obey the orders of the President of the United States”?
Looking back in history, I see that many if not all the presidents have subverted the US Constitution either in the letter or spirit of that defective document. LBJ, FDR, Wilson, Lincoln and even Washington all said that some existing crises necessitated their decisions and actions. So what good is this document (as Lysander Spooner said)?
The answer is “Absolutely Nothing!” This document does nothing to restrain tyranny in these united States as it was originally intended, by some of its authors.
But I digress, for a better question is why was this document needed? Why were the Articles of Confederation just tossed aside? Why was this document drafted in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia behind closed doors in tremendous secrecy?
The truth is, if word leaked out of the actual contents, the original intent and the agenda that was behind this major shift, the revolution that had just concluded would have been set ablaze again. The authors of this document were in a race against time and did everything in their power to ensure that the adoption took place as quickly as possible to avoid reflection and contemplation in the public square that would kill the proposal once the consequences of its agenda became apparent.
They were actually insisting that the states ratify first and then propose amendments later. The document had no bill of rights and it actually gave more power to the general or central government. It was a political coup d’état. No wonder Patrick Henry said he smelled a rat.
It was nothing less than an oligarchical coup to ensure that the moneyed interests, bankers and aristocrats could cement their positions and mimic the United Kingdom from which they had been recently divorced.
In the interests of truth, the document that should be taught before the US Constitution is in fact the Articles of Confederation that was conceived in 1776 and adopted in 1781. As William Buppert explains:
As Austrian economists have discovered, bigger is not necessarily better. The brilliant and oft-dismissed Articles of Confederation (AoC) and Perpetual Union are a testament to voluntarism and cooperation through persuasion that the Constitution disposed of with its adoption. Penned in 1776 and ratified in 1781, the spirit and context of the Articles live on in the Swiss canton system and are everywhere evident in the marketplace where confederationist sentiments are practiced daily. The confederation’s design divines its mechanism from what an unfettered market does every day: voluntary cooperation, spontaneous information signals and the parts always being smarter than the sum A. confederation according to the Webster’s 1828 dictionary is:
The act of confederating; a league; a compact for mutual support; alliance; particularly of princes, nations or states.
This ‘marriage’ retains the freedom of the entities that would voluntary join to also exit. What is obvious is that the US Constitution did not guarantee this exit clause, otherwise the state constitutions of New York and Virginia would not have had exit rights penned into their own documents. Furthermore, when the Constitutional Convention convened in 1787, 55 delegates came but 14 later quit as the Convention eventually abused its mandate and scrapped the Articles of Confederation instead of revising it.
Ultimately, actions spoke louder than words when even the much admired Washington was revealed as having none of the talk of independence and wanting a firm hand on the yoke of the states to make them obey their masters on high. Washington’s behavior in the Whiskey Rebellion cast away any doubts of the imperious behavior of the central government a mere four year after the adoption of the Constitution.
There were those who stood in the way, but typical to politics in general, these people are marginalized. Patrick Henry gave the firmest defense of the skeptical posture when he questioned the precarious position the Constitution put to the state’s sovereignty on 5 June 1788 at the Virginia Ratifying Convention. It should be noted that the savvy ‘Founding Lawyers’ ensured that the process of ratification was sped along by bypassing the bicameral house requirements and simply asking the states to conduct ratifying conventions. Henry’s text says:
“How were the Congressional rights defined when the people of America united by a confederacy to defend their liberties and rights against the tyrannical attempts of Great-Britain? The States were not then contented with implied reservation. No, Mr. Chairman. It was expressly declared in our Confederation that every right was retained by the States respectively, which was not given up to the Government of the United States. But there is no such thing here. You therefore by a natural and unavoidable implication, give up your rights to the General Government. Your own example furnishes an argument against it. If you give up these powers, without a Bill of Rights, you will exhibit the most absurd thing to mankind that ever the world saw — A Government that has abandoned all its powers — The powers of direct taxation, the sword, and the purse. You have disposed of them to Congress, without a Bill of Rights — without check, limitation, or controul. And still you have checks and guards — still you keep barriers — pointed where? Pointed against your weakened, prostrated, enervated State Government! You have a Bill of Rights to defend you against the State Government, which is bereaved of all power; and yet you have none against Congress, though in full and exclusive possession of all power! You arm youselves against the weak and defenceless, and expose yourselves naked to the armed and powerful. Is not this a conduct of unexampled absurdity? What barriers have you to oppose to this most strong energetic Government? To that Government you have nothing to oppose. All your defence is given up. This is a real actual defect. . . “
We, in 2019, are feeling the full effects of this constitution’s real purpose with the emergence of the government spying on its citizens and the whole Red Flag law emergence. Total control implies that all guns are in the government’s hands so that “All your defence is given up”
Helpless tax slaves is the aim of the government we have today, thanks in part to the efforts of Madison, Hamilton and John Jay.
It appears that James Madison tried to reverse himself somewhat by introducing ten amendments called the Bill of Rights, but it was too little, too late, and only represented a piece of paper:
“Our constitutions purport to be established by ‘the people,’ and, in theory, ‘all the people’ consent to such government as the constitutions authorize. But this consent of ‘the people’ exists only in theory. It has no existence in fact. Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.”~ Lysander Spooner
The friends, family and community-centric patriotism of the 1600 and 1700s could be triggered by this flag. This is the Union Jack representing the union between England (+Wales) and Scotland. In time, as conditions worsened, the Union Jack was a symbol of tyranny of a state apparatus that went beyond protecting their citizen’s rights and became oppressive to life itself.
As the Bad Quaker explains in this article (where the quotes that follow are sourced from), there is a difference between nationalism and patriotism. The symbols (flag, song, etc) that originally were the pride of the patriot became stolen to reflect a nation-state whose attributes were not anything one would prefer in a friend’s character, but of someone you would keep at a distance.
.. consider if the word ‘nationalism’ were represented by the phrase ‘team spirit’ and the word ‘patriotism’ by the phrase ‘friends, family, and community’ ..
As the Bad Quaker points out, team spirit will always overlook the bad attributes of one’s team and always seeing the good in it. In this, there is no performance or behavior that will cause one to switch loyalty over.
Friends, family and community are actually people that are to be defended from aggressive forces, or lifted up in times of trials .. a condition of the sacrificial love of others.
So the State is the source of nationalism, while the warrior is the source of patriotism.
So what about the symbols of the state, country or people group? This gets a bit more complicated but again, Bad Quaker has some insight into this:
The National Flag is a perversion of the warrior’s banner, a symbol of the nobility of his heritage and his independence.
The National Song is the socialist version of the many spontaneous songs that would breakout as warriors arose to defend their honor, singing songs of bravery and victory.
The Salute as a military gesture was once a source of common respect and trust among warriors, but twisted by the State it has become a tool for lesser men to show authority over true warriors.
The state has twisted and tainted what once was good and honorable. At its inceptions, the idea of America was a noble one but it was quickly hijacked for an agenda of power and control. Unfortunately, revolutions routinely provide much of the same oppression and tyranny that appeared before the conflict and warfare, and sometimes even more (i.e. French Revolution)
Bad Quaker goes on to explain:
… the heart of the patriot is naturally stirred as he sees the National Flag unfurled or as he hears the National Song because these things were once the property of the warrior. However they have been largely usurped by the State with the express intention of confusing the patriot. And we must see this, the State stole these things because nationalism is false and empty and it is only by theft and deception that the State can convince patriots to support its ongoing aggressions. It is only through deception and theft that the State can convince true warriors to fight its wars. Nationalism is void of bravery because nationalism sits behind a desk and sends others to fight. Nationalism is quick to wave a flag and just as quick to drop it on the ground as soon as the parade passes.
Now the following is very important to note in the case of current events when there are people NOT standing for the national anthem and other people see that dishonoring. As a veteran, I served so that people could be free to NOT stand during a nationalistic focus at a sports event OR while in a government school. No one should be coerced or forced to “worship” a state flag EVEN when there are “patriots” around that see this flag as something that represents family, friends and community.
Unfortunately, the state has PAID (with your tax dollars) to have most major sporting events be preceded by the worship of the state flag and with the state song since the 1940s. Before this there was rarely any display like this AND before the so called “Civil War”, most people identified with their state and not with the federal or general government of the united States. (THAT is not a typo, many original documents capitalized the “S” in States while NOT capitalizing the “u” in united, for a reason)
Nationalism is the hollow dead emotion the State wants patriotism to become. Nationalism is the false pride in one’s self at the accomplishments of others, while patriotism is pride in individual accomplishment.
True story. The state is paranoid that its delusion may lose to real patriotism, so it will at every chance and especially with your dime make sure you are reminded every time there are sports played in the USA that you remember who you are to worship.
The bottom line:
.. there is no place for nationalism in a free society, patriotism and the warrior spirit are a natural and needed aspect of freedom. The trick is in separating the two, as Paul the apostle once said, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”
