Tag: USS Maine

The US Empire Targets Christians in their Cross-hairs – How Did it Come to This?

The journey of thirteen British colonies pushing out the British Empire towards becoming the American Empire is an interesting one. No one wants to be a target .. especially when the shooter is a global empire whether Roman, British or American.

The shift from federated republic to a centralized state with dreams of empire started early on even as the American Revolution drew to a close. Powerful people with their own version of empire on their mind would eventually get there way with the US Constitution coup d’etat in 1787 to Lincoln’s War on Southern Independence as well as the total war on Southerners and Indians to the blame placed on Spain for the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba harbor through Woodrow Wilson and beyond. As they say, the rest is history.

What really helped is summarized in a couple of recent articles, one by Bionic Mosquito called Evangelicalism and another by Brad Hoff called Syrians Were Quietly Warned Before the War.

As with all trends that impact nations and people groups, this all gets real messy real fast and stays that way. This is seen in the Bible as well as throughout most of history that evil forces seem to get the upper hand time and again as there is no real long term peace from this world’s experiences.

Specific to the US’s trajectory toward becoming a brutal empire was the bent for power and control, first of the land to the west of the thirteen colonies and eventually around the world especially after WWII.

Tracking the heart of American thought starting in the early 1800s it is apparent that a movement of Christian religious thought left the foundation that Jesus Himself emphasized during His lifetime. Bionic Mosquito rightly pinpoints several influencers that distorted what it meant to be a Jesus-Follower towards becoming a self-centered global terrorist, carrying a Bible.

[Regarding] the evangelical timeline and splintering… What I view as, perhaps, the most corrupting: John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Scofield. A focus on end-times theology, a focus on a state for Israel (resulting in a worship of the modern state with that name). Scofield, a scoundrel in his personal life, would somehow have his reference Bible printed by the prestigious Oxford Press! Many denominations would read from his Bible.

There would be a further splintering in the form of “Bible-believing Christians” vs. liberal modernists – they would push for all having to conform (leftists never change). There would also be a mushy middle in every denomination, eventually leading to a growth in the liberal side – after all, if you don’t feel strongly about something, you won’t really fight for it.

Distractions like this attract the masses and are passed on throughout the generations and what you end up with is a political Christianity, one that Jesus would say “you still don’t get it do you?”.

In the US this culminated about the time of Woodrow Wilson:

There was revivalism: western New York, Tennessee, the Cumberland Valley. Charles Grandison Finney – emotionalism for the sake of emotionalism. People have the free will to choose salvation (see Luther and Calvin spinning in their graves). You don’t have to wait for God to do His work; you decide – just come forward (a prototype for Billy Graham, it seems).

L. Moody – the YMCA, hymnals, the Moody Press. Billy Sunday – went from professional baseball player to evangelist. He attracted the largest crowds of any in the late eighteenth-century – and he played a significant role in the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment (no booze).

Biblicism was weakened – just get a confession of faith; the door was opened to liberalism and the leftist version of the social justice movement. The Enlightenment contributed here: reason, divorced from God, could not accept many of the claims of the Bible. Let’s just try to hold onto the moral stuff, without the grounding in the Bible or in worship.

I am reminded of Murray Rothbard’s work, World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals:

Also animating both groups of progressives was a postmillennial pietist Protestantism that had conquered “Yankee” areas of northern Protestantism by the 1830s and had impelled the pietists to use local, state, and finally federal governments to stamp out “sin,” to make America and eventually the world holy, and thereby to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth.

The high-bar (or low-bar, more accurately) of this merger can be summed up in two words: Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson with his dream, post WWI, of the League of Nations was a primer for the US entrance as the baton receiver when the British Empire lost its possessions during WWII. The US decided to do “empire” differently and more covertly. The US would target various countries for regime change to “manage” the world, and Christians themselves would be targeted just like during the Roman Empire.

This is where the article by Brad Hoff takes over showing how Christians are blindsided when they become the target. I wonder how many US Christian still think that this policy can’t come “home” to domestic soil .. even Robert E. Lee saw this in 1866:

Below is the Syrian doctor Shaza’s story, excerpted from the book…

As Shaza mused on the catastrophic shift from an idyllic life to one of upheaval, she recounted being given a forewarning of the Syrian Christian tragedy. As a physician Shaza ministered to those displaced due to the Iraq War: “I worked with the Iraqi refugees from 2003 to 2010 in a charity center. It’s a program done by the Church, but they are accepting all the people – Christians and Muslims.” Little did Shaza foresee that less than a decade into the future it would be Syrian Christians themselves caught in dire straits.

Shaza related how a number of Iraq refugees tried to warn her:

They talk about horrible stories. They’re kidnapping, killing, raping. When they trust me after a couple of years, they keep saying, “Have a plan B. They are going to do this with Syrian Christians.” I keep saying, “No, it will not happen.” They keep saying, “No, it’s going to happen, so think about what is your next step if it’s happened.” And we didn’t think about that. We never thought that this will happen in Syria. Most of the Syrians – they keep saying that it’s protected because it’s a strong region. I have been to Iraq and to Jordan, to Egypt, in the past as a tourist – I saw poor people. We never see them in Syria. We have no homeless people in Syria. It’s a prosperous country. It was a good country, but after, I think, 2006 or ’07 till 2010, we began to notice something. Maybe politics, maybe economic, I don’t know what’s the problem, but something happened, you know. Makes the people more poor so more suffer. They have these thoughts of revolution. I think that made them easily accepted this. 

I think the last part of this snippet is key. The empire targets people groups and impoverishes them so they become revolutionaries so the state can use that excuse to crush the rebellion. The state/empire always claims it is bringing “democracy”, however in fact it brings terror and poverty to destabilize the region to ensure regime changed nations remain 3rd world status. This is the American Empire’s MO (modus operandi )

At the end of the day, Christians became the target in the Middle East when the American Empire was playing “find the terrorists” especially since the 1990s.  I am pretty certain the American Empire is as secular as it can get as any “Christian Principles” were thrown out decades if not centuries ago. You can count on the American Empire to have its eyes on Christians domestically in the years and decades to come. Are you ready for this?

Peace out.

-SF1

Traits of an Empire: Rarely if Ever Honorable

From my last post lamenting the benefits of small nations or federations of small republics and city-states, it became rather obvious that the formation of the Articles of Confederation which linked thirteen colonies together to fight against the British Empire was a noble effort, and that Switzerland decided early on to retain this focus unlike the United States:

After the revolutionary war, many founders abandoned the Swiss model as being too week and opted again towards the large-state model..

In today’s post, I use primarily an article from Darius Shahtahmasebi that explains the impact that many of the US Empire’s wars have had on Muslims over time. Darius does a great job of balancing the fact that it is not that the Muslims were targeted, but like the American Indians, it has more to do with the content their lands have for potential empire resources or disruptions in trade routes.

There are then several phases of the US Empire’s history that I hope to unpack today as a lesson we can all learn from so we can better understand the true character of the empire’s endeavors.

The first phase happened when the united States, having been victorious in its quest for independence from the British Empire, was potentially left unprotected in world trade. The source I chose for this was an article that helps to identify what really might have gone town in the tension between the US (which many consider to be a Christian nation) and the Barbary Powers (that happened to be primarily Muslim in religious terms). The truth is that these Barbary ‘corsairs’ were not only Muslim but also included English privateers and Dutch captains who exploited the changing loyalties of an era in which friends could become enemies and enemies friends with the stroke of a pen.

In the Barbary ‘pirate’ era, these entrepreneurs were not content with attacking ships and sailors, the corsairs also sometimes raided coastal settlements in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, England, Ireland, and even as far away as the Netherlands and Iceland. They landed on unguarded beaches, and crept up on villages in the dark to capture their victims. This did not begin with these powers that ended up enslaving over one million Europeans, but was preceded by Christian pirates, primarily from Catalonia and Sicily, that dominated the seas, posing a constant threat to merchants in the 13th and 14th centuries.

Back to the Barbary powers of the Ottoman Empire of the 15th century:

During the era of the American colonies, American merchant vessels received protection by virtue of being of being British; the British were among the countries that paid tribute. Then, during the American Revolution, an alliance with France protected American ships. But full independence brought an end to that.

Initially, the United States decided to pay tribute. But American leaders, including Jefferson, seethed at having to do it, saying it would only inspire more and more outrageous financial demands. On July 11, 1786, Jefferson wrote to John Adams, “I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace thro’ the medium of war.” The following month, he wrote to James Monroe that the Barbary powers “must see the rod; perhaps it must be felt by some one of them.”

Jefferson truly believed that the sea trade routes should be free. However, during the George Washington and John Adams administrations, the tribute was paid as was done by all the European powers, in fact, the rift was identified as economic in nature and not seen as religious:

As early as 1797, the United States made clear in a treaty with Tripoli that “as the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen (Muslims) and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan (Mohammedan or Muslim) nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

Once Jefferson became the US President, he decided that enough was enough:

After Jefferson became president in 1801, he rejected Tripoli’s demand for payment. The pasha of Tripoli countered by declaring war on the United States. Jefferson sent forces to the Mediterranean, and after sporadic combat, hostilities ended four years later with a negotiated settlement in which the United States paid a smaller tribute than had initially been demanded.

The era of Barbary corsairs effectively ended a decade later, when, after the U.S. Navy, battle-hardened from the War of 1812, won a quick victory against Algiers, effectively ending all tribute payments.

By 1815, after the US’s war against the British Empire, the US flexed its muscles and used force to protect US shipping going forward. Shortly after this, the US found itself in a war with Mexico in the late 1840s and by 1860, fought an attempt to split the United States into two confederations. By this time there were powerful elites who saw that the economies of scale incentivized a violent end to the effort to have an adjacent federation have in effect a free trade zone.

The trend in hindsight becomes clear as the United States, in its second phase, turns its eyes to the Plains Indians after successfully placing the South in military districts, as this article explains:

In an attempt at peace in 1851, the first Fort Laramie Treaty was signed, which granted the Plain Indians about 150 million acres of land for their own use as the Great Sioux Reservation. Then, 13 years later, the size was greatly reduced to about 60 million acres in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which recreated the Great Sioux Reservation boundaries and proclaimed all of South Dakota west of the Missouri river, including the Black Hills, solely for the Sioux Nation.

As part of the treaty, no unauthorized non-Indian was to come into the reservation and the Sioux were allowed to hunt in unceded Indian territory beyond the reservation that stretched into North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado. If any non-Indian wanted to settle on this unceded land, they could only do it with the permission of the Sioux.

That was until 1874, when gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills. The treaties that were signed between the Native Americans and the U.S. government were ignored as gold rushers invaded Indian Territory and issues arose, such as the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

As time went on, the American Indians continued to be pushed into smaller territories and their lives began to diminish. In 1889, the U.S. government issued the Dawes Act, which took the Black Hills from the Indians, broke up the Great Sioux Reservation into five separate reservations, and took nine million acres and opened it up for public purchase by non-Indians for homesteading and settlements.

The Native Americans were squeezed into these smaller territories and didn’t have enough game to support them. The bison that had been a staple to their way of life were gone. Their ancestral lands that sustained them were no longer theirs. The resistance was over. They were no longer free people, living amongst themselves, but “Redskins” confined by the “white man” in reservations they had been forced to, many against their will.

At this point, one might logically think that the US is done with its expansion as it now is in total control of all the lands from the east to the west coast of North America. However, there were plenty of elites that were very willing in their agenda for:

… capitalizing on a national tragedy to push through an unrelated agenda. The explosion of the Maine in Havana’s harbor — killing some 260 sailors — was the immediate catalyst for the invasion of Cuba and then the Philippines.

Y’all do know that the USS Maine was NOT sabotaged by the Spanish in Cuba, right?

The result was a third phase in this trend toward empire.

Again, you have a list of critical thinkers that understand the down-side of empire, called the Anti-Imperialist effort in 1898, outlined in this article:

“We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We maintain that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We insist that the subjugation of any people is ‘criminal aggression’ and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our Government.

“We earnestly condemn the policy of the present National Administration in the Philippines. It seeks to extinguish the spirit of 1776 in those islands. We deplore the sacrifice of our soldiers and sailors, whose bravery deserves admiration even in an unjust war. We denounce the slaughter of the Filipinos as a needless horror. We protest against the extension of American sovereignty by Spanish methods…”

.. to your typical statist media b*llshit we still see today:

Today, the medium from which most Americans get their news, television, plays much the same role as the “yellow press” of William Randolph Hearst — cheerleading for war. Then, as now, the argument justifying war started as a matter of self-defense, then morphed into a war for “freedom,” and finally stood naked as a political and economic power grab

So on and on it goes, the US Empire emerges well in advance of WWII, already using shady ways to promote its power on the world’s stage.

The latest chapter is probably not that last, but the character of this empire will be remembered for generations:

U.S.-led wars in the Middle East have killed some four million Muslims since 1990. The recently published Afghanistan papers, provided an insight into the longest war in U.S. history and revealed how U.S. officials continuously lied about the progress being made in Afghanistan, lacked a basic understanding of the country, were hiding evidence that the war was unwinnable, and had wasted as much as $1 trillion in the process.

This parallels a little known previous ‘longest war’ that was initiated a century before:

.. the U.S. waged a war from 1899 to 1913 in the southernmost island of the Philippines. Known as the Moro War, it was the longest sustained military campaign in American history until the war in Afghanistan surpassed it a few years ago. As a result, the U.S. and the Philippine governments are still embroiled in a battle with Islamist insurgents in the southern Philippines, which takes the meaning of “forever war” to a whole new level

.. the U.S. military was not welcome in the Philippines, much as it is not welcomed by Afghanistan or any other Muslim-majority nation which has to duel with the U.S. Empire. After the U.S. defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and annexed the Philippines under the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the Moro population were not even consulted. The U.S. then sought to “pacify” them using brute force.

“I want no prisoners,” ordered General Jacob Smith on Samar Island during the war in 1902. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.”

The tactics remain the same, total war from Sherman and Sheridan used in the so-called Civil War, to the war on the American Indians, to the war in the Philippines, to Afghanistan and beyond is somehow construed to be “American Exceptionalism”.

I think I am sick to my stomach.

Enough for now.

Peace out.

-SF1

War Can Be Avoided – Even for the US Empire! (Rarely) – Retro 1983

Service members pick through the rubble following the bombing of the USMC barracks in Beirut, Lebanon on Oct. 23, 1983. The terror attack resulted in the deaths of 220 Marines. File Photo by USMC/UPI

You can count on one hand the times that the United States of America refrained from its drive for war. While its third president said on 04MAR1801:

… peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none …

… in hindsight, presidents that followed Thomas Jefferson did not have those ideals and/or could not resist the unity that happens when the war path is decided on. War is good for the state as well, which statesmen back in the day and politicians today realize clearly. The state was meant for war.

However, there was a time in the early 1980s when the US backed off from the war path. It was tempting, but at the end of the day, cooler heads prevailed. As Kenny Rogers sang

He said, “If you’re gonna play the game, boy
You gotta learn to play it right
You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run

In this article, the details emerge from a time in 1983-1984 when the US Empire acted more like a man of character than that of a bully. Confident that knowing when “to hold them, and knowing when to run” displayed more meekness, power under control, than most Presidential administrations to date.

While Reagan’s administration piled on the debt more than Carter’s, engaged in the drug trafficking trade called the Iran-Contra Affair, and also ratcheted up “gun-control”, this event in Lebanon and the US response is something that needs to be remembered and admired.

Setting the stage:

In October of 1983, a truck filled with explosives leveled the four-story U.S. Marine Barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 American military personnel. The intelligence community laid responsibility for the act at the feet of Tehran’s mullahs, who’d tasked Hezbollah, their proxy in Lebanon, with pushing the U.S. (which had deployed the Marines as part of a multinational peacekeeping mission) out of the region. The incident (the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War Two, as we were told at the time), touched off a legendary internal Reagan Administration dispute over how, and whether, the U.S. should retaliate.

As today, there were members of the administration that were more war-hawk in nature, and others who have been in combat, and acutely know what the unintentional consequences might be in ordering a retaliation.

I do like Caspar Weinberger’s (US Army veteran of some intense Pacific fighting in WWII) angle:

Secretary of Defense [Weinberger] had opposed the deployment of the Marines to begin with, and had the support of the military. Colin Powell, Weinberger’s senior military assistant, spoke for many of the military’s leaders when he described the Lebanon deployment “goofy from the beginning.”

On the other side was Secretary of State George Shultz:

For Shultz, however, revisiting the deployment decision was a waste of time. In a series of knock-down-drag-outs that pitted him against Weinberger, the Secretary of State argued that “American credibility” (that old standby), was being tested and that, therefore, the deaths of 241 U.S. Marines was cause enough for a military escalation.

The kicker comes here where Weinberger’s wisdom is revealed:

Weinberger disagreed: “retaliation against who?” he asked. Slow-rolling the president, he argued that the U.S. needed better intelligence before deciding who to punish. Weinberger was adamant: the U.S. had just left one unwinnable conflict (in Vietnam), and shouldn’t be so quick to start another. He dug in.

I do wish that this effort could be made today. Instead of lashing out like a bully swinging wildly to and fro, connecting here, connecting there mainly with innocent people and missing the real culprits, can’t today’s US government ever take time and wisely ascertain what is really happening? No more “WMD’s in Iraq”, no more Colin Powell holding some “chemical weapon” in his fingers at the UN, no more stories of babies in incubators left to die. The CIA/MI6/Mossad deep state “evidence” needs to be compared to truly independent science, if one can every practically get there.

Maybe, just maybe today’s announcement that Sen. Rand Paul has been chosen to be a point of dialog with the regime in Iran, is a rare piece of good news that I myself have been waiting years if not decades for.

Back to 1983.

It seems that the Vietnam War was not too far in the rear-view mirror as men with war experience from WWII in the South Pacific, who started as PRIVATES, who have seen the elephant, could wisely speak into:

NOTE: “Weinberger was a Harvard-educated lawyer, his formative experience came in World War II, where he served as an infantry officer during the 1942 Battle of Buna—a fetid, leech-infested Japanese base on the rim of northern New Guinea. For those who survived, including Weinberger, the swamp-slogging battle was an unrelenting nightmare: at its end, the Japanese resorted to cannibalism and used the bodies of the dead to reinforce their defenses. ”

Staying strong:

The Shultz-Weinberger tilt dragged on until February of 1984, when Reagan decided to “redeploy” the Marines to U.S. ships on station in the Mediterranean. The “redeployment” was seen by Shultz as an ignominious retreat, a sign of American weakness. But, as capably rendered by Marine Colonel and historian David Crist in The Twilight War, that’s not the way the Pentagon viewed it.

Only the insecure thinks this is a loss. The mature and secure person can see better the big picture and risk the possibility of this reaction to be seen as week.

Then the truth is unearthed, something that the US Empire struggles with to this very day:

The problem with American policy in the Middle East, Koch implied, was American hypocrisy—and our selective use of the word terrorism: when our friends plant bombs we say it’s because they’re defending our values, but when our enemies do it, it’s terrorism.

The entangling alliances will always cause hypocrisy. We had been warned from over 200 years ago and we (especially our leaders) still don’t get it.

Over reaction to the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, or to anything we might see in the Persian Gulf in the coming weeks and months is a recipe for a disaster that will over-shadow Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Things were very different even 5, 10, 15 and even 20 years ago. The world has changed, Russia and China have not only survived US sanctions and tariff wars, but they also have allies in other countries that have been bullied by the US Empire especially since the end of WWII.

.. striking back, killing who you can because you can (and simply to assuage your own anger) is not only “beneath our dignity”—it’s a signpost on the road to unwinnable wars.

Don’t we know it. The US Empire legacy lives on, and it ain’t a pretty sight.

-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