Switch the Names of the Parties and Who Do You Think Would NOT Have Lived this Down

History Note:

1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre

In 1868, St. Bernard Parish was home to one of the deadliest massacres in Louisiana history. The St. Bernard Parish massacre occurred during the Reconstruction era, days before the Presidential election of 1868. As black men gained the right to vote, white Democrats of the parish feared losing their majority. Armed groups mobilized to violently silence these recently emancipated voters to win the election in favor of Democrat Horatio Seymour over Republican Ulysses S. Grant. A Seymour victory meant the end of Reconstruction over the South and the return of Louisiana to home rule. Many freedmen were dragged from their homes and murdered. Others fled to the cane fields to hide from the perpetrators.

The use of violence to suppress Republican votes was successful. Grant only received one vote from St. Bernard Parish, despite having a Republican majority. The reported number of freedmen killed varies from 35 to 135; the number of whites killed was two (one was killed in an attempt to help the victims)

© Excerpt from Wikipedia  

The mass murder of blacks by Louisiana Democrats has practically disappeared from history. If you asked most college students these days, which political party was responsible for the massacre, who do you suppose they would say was to blame?

You KNOW who would be blamed....

Restoring the Hereditary Nobility - The Socialist Shell Game

 

The United States of America was formed in 1776 and founded on a radical principle; one that had been floating around the English speaking world for quite some time. It was a radical notion that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. 

 

This idea rocked the European nobility in particular because it was seen as a threat to their comfy if occasionally dangerous positions. It was bad enough that their squabbles among themselves ever so often cost one or the other of them their heads. That was just the hazard of being nobility. But the very idea that the ignorant rabble might want to get into the power game horrified them. Why, farmers and shopkeepers might make themselves presidents and prime ministers and start telling the dukes and barons and viscounts what to do. Pamphlets began circulating espousing the "divine right of kings."  But ideas like those of John Locke and the evidence provided by the fledgling United States which was founded on the ideas of Locke and other egalitarian philosophers, were powerful and found an eager audience among the downtrodden and oppressed.

 

By the mid 1800s, particularly in America, there had grown to be a powerful prejudice against the ruling classes. The fading nobility and upper classes of Europe and America, desperate to reestablish the idea of hereditary ruling classes, seized on Darwin and Marx as tools to change things back. The new "scientific" doctrine of survival of the fittest was, for them, proof that genetically superior persons and their offspring were endowed by nature itself with the capacity to rule. By layering Darwin atop Marx they could make the argument for the idea of a ruling class being "natural".

 

This of course was a thinly veiled bit of propaganda, useful in making the case that there should be but two classes - the leaders of the people class and the proletariat. It was also a nice bit of philosophy that justified the leader class's privilege and prestige. It was little more than a recycling of the "divine right of kings" argument. 

 

Socialism was seen as a way to restore the divine right, if not of kings, then at least of genetically superior smart people. There's a reason so many progressive / socialist countries have dynasties. Entitled tyrannies are Satan's favorite form of government. Centralized power means Lucifer has fewer people to deceive in order to do the most evil with the least effort. And make no mistake about it. Satan, per his original dispute with God, believes that free will is dangerous and that the way to handle humans is by rigid control. Little images of God running loose with their creativity and their ability to choose he argued were just too dangerous to order and stability. The old devil believed we needed someone like him to tell us humans what to do (and more importantly, what not to do.) It's why the old monarchies and the new socialist societies have had such lovely Gestapos, KGBs, Pravdas, pogroms, genocides, gulags, extermination camps and reeducation centers. 

 

THAT is the great controversy of our world - freedom vs tyranny. Christianity vs Progressivism, BF Skinner, Freud, Nietzsche, Marx and Darwin vs Jesus, Locke, Lewis. and White. God never intended that there should be a ruling class. He warned the Israelites against choosing a king. The very first king of Israel quickly proved that God was right about monarchies.

And yet today, down near the end of the world or at least the end of the humans on it who seemed determined to exterminate themselves, we wonder after the Beast, looking for a god of stone and fire, made in our own image. We seek gods we think we can control - human surrogate gods that reassure us that our fate is in our own hands and that no matter what horrors we commit along the way, we will have our utopia on our own terms. A utopia established by our own works, without submitting to any God, especially to a God who thinks we shouldn't sin and who won't come down at our insistence that He make Himself visible to us and behave like we think He ought to. We say, "If there was a God, then he would......" and then name something God would do if they were Him.

The thing is, God actually did come down and make Himself visible to us and showed us His character. And what did we do?  Because He didn't do it the way we thought, because He didn't come with power, fire, thunder and lightning to destroy our enemies and praise our leaders as we thought He ought to, we crucified Him. But for all our efforts to pound God into submission, to make Him into our image, God remains His own larger-than-life self, and we remain petulant children throwing tantrums before Him.

It explains the temper tantrums by the human supremacists among us when they don't get their way. It also explains the temper tantrums by the human supremacists when they do get their way and some of us don't genuflect to them in obeisance because they won.

 

Because things don't work the way we think they ought, we habitually look around among ourselves for someone to blame for our troubles.  Oddly enough, we always seem to settle on people. who are happy and content to trust in their Maker, people who are content and not as miserable as ourselves, to blame for the world not working the way we think it ought to. 

 

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that the actual God, the one not make of stone, and human narcissism, is, as CS Lewis described Him, "...not a tame lion."  There are no levers we can pull, no magic incantations we can say that will make God dance to the tune we want to play.

And that frightens people, or at least the ones who place no faith in Him who created us. So they look around for someone to blame, someone to put into reeducation camps, someone to imprison, torture and kill in a vain attempt to silence their own fears. It's always about power because the great deception that the devil has perpetrated is that seizing power for yourself is the only way to protect you from the consequences of your sins. But we cannot sin with impunity for the wages of sin is inevitably, death. 

And that really frightens them and makes them dangerous. But as I keep telling people, Jesus is coming soon and it's not a conquest this time around. It's a rescue mission. After the world immolates itself and has time to rest a thousand years, then we will return to an Earth made new without dictators, princes and potentates. No tax man, no police, no armies, no funeral directors.

Progress will be in our own hands after all. God built that wonderful gift of self-determination into us. Now that the sin has been cleansed from us and we have seen first hand what comes of evil, no one will need to be coerced, bullied, or thrown in jail to keep the peace. No one will desire to have power over anyone else. Mankind will be free to build, explore and create things we can only imagine and some things we aren't able to imagine. As my friend Steve used to describe it, "Always another tomorrow." I could really get into that, you know?

© 2021 by Tom King 

Hooray for Friedrich Trump!

Friedrich Trump

Historian finds German decree banishing Trump's grandfather!

 

So screams the headline in the British Tabloid, the Guardian, a news agency of the caliber of a World News Daily, National Enquirer or the New York Times. The Guardian is breathlessly reporting that a "historian" has discovered that Donald Trump's Grandpa Friedrich Trump (or Drumpf if you believe other "historians"), was banished from Germany for failing to do military service. My Democrat friends have been quick to gleefully point out that, "The apple doesn't fall from the tree." Apparently this is some kind of counting coup thing, a quaint tribal custom they have apparently learned from Elizabeth Warren's Native American tribe.

Are you people kidding? First of all, Friedrich had already left Germany for America in 1885 and simply forgot to de-register for the German draft. When he tried to re-enter Germany, they wouldn't let him in because his draft notice had come back unanswered because Trump was off in Alaska running a bordello for gold miners by all accounts. So the story goes flat there and the spinning of the story gets immediately filed in the "fake news" box by anyone who actually reads the whole story all the way to the end and not just the headline.

Besides, back then, all the best people were being kicked out of Europe and Asia - from all of the Old World countries for that matter. The "civilized" countries were getting rid of their troublemaker and these independent thinkers were drawn to America like moths to the flame.

 

And another thing. Weren't these same guys trying to Trump-shame the President, also the very little Ikes who have been telling us ad nauseum that we need immigration to improve our workforce? And the answer is, "Of course we do!" And Friedrich Trump came here LEGALLY. That's the point isn't it? Legal immigrants have never in our history been as welcome as they are now. We are robbing the world of excellent doctors, engineers, computer programmers and scientists right and left. What hard-working oppressed person wouldn't want to come here. It's why we've succeeded as a nation. We take in the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free and we make them into energetic, wealthy, independent individuals who are, in fact free! As Bill Murray so eloquently put it in his famous speech in the movie "Stripes", "We're Americans. We've been kicked out of every decent country in the world! We're Mutts! That's what makes us great!"

 

The truth is that the German Army was an instrument of oppression at the time. The fact that Grandpa Drumpf refused to serve in that organization and left his native land forever is a point in his favor to my way of thinking.

So way to go Grandpa Drumpf! An honorable man escaped from a dishonorable country. He never launched mustard gas at anyone. He never rolled over a peaceful neighbor country in a tank. He never raped a French girl. If you ask me Grandpa Friedrich was fortunate to have got out of that appalling country when he did. Germany was fast becoming an evil place. One might even call it a "$#!+hole" (to coin a phrase that Democrats can't prove the president ever said).

Just sayin'

© 2017 by Tom King

Stop Picking on Columbus!

Was Christopher Columbus Really Bad For America?

In the interest of full disclosure, many of my ancestors were Native American - Cherokee for some of them. My wife has Alabama-Coushatta ancestors. My ancestors were badly mistreated by some of my other ancestors. Some of my other ancestors mistreated by them. Plenty of naughty behavior on both sides. It's just one bunch of my ancestors were simply better at fighting than the other bunch. That's about all it was. But make no mistake. Both sides were responsible.

This from Aztec "Art".

So, this time of year it has become the thing to do for the progressive left to blame poor old Columbus and those who followed him for killing some 300 million or so Native Americans. Of course, there probably weren't that many Native North and South Americans who lived between the time Columbus came and now - at least not so long as the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas had their way. And if there is, it's pretty obvious white folks didn't manage to kill them all.

Did my European ancestors bring some diseases with them?  Yes. but that wasn't deliberate. The smallpox blanket story is balderdash. It supposedly happened before anyone actually knew about germs and how diseases spread.  Scalping? The French and English used that, but the gentle Native Americans took it up with a vengeance. Did the Spanish wage war on the Meso-American native civilizations. Well, that's true, but then, the Meso-Americans were waging war long before the Spaniards came. The Spaniards were just better at it.

What the folks spreading around the mythology of the "noble savage" and the sophisticated native civilizations don't tell you is that the Natives weren't all that noble or sophisticated. The civilizations of the Purépechas, the Toltecs, the Olmecs, the Teotihuacán, the Mayans, the Aztecs, and the Incans were really quite good at mass murder. Human sacrifice, for instance, has been described, even by those who try to justify their practices, as "integral" to their societies. By integral, they mean, these guys did a lot of sacrificing.

Human sacrifice was, for instance the way the Aztecs sought to repay their debt to the gods. Apologists for the Aztecs carry on about how Aztecs gladly participated in the sacrifices, parting with all their worldly goods and their lives. Given the seriously perverse rituals related to these sacrifices, I rather doubt they were that thrilled about it. The "stage" for human sacrifice was the massive temple-pyramids. The kept all their bestest art, treasure and the bones of their victims buried beneath it.

The Aztecs were not peaceful; the were quite warlike. Three tribes, the Aztecs, Tlaxcala, Huexotzingo and Cholula formed an alliance. Fifty years before Columbus, Central America had a series of droughts and famines. These guys decided that it was punishment by the gods because they weren't properly honored. Me? I think the priests were a bunch of perverts. They ginned up what they called the "Flower Wars". They used these wars to obtain captives for human sacrifice. This ritualized warfare was used as a way to train soldiers for close combat. Warriors were supposed to fight in close and injure enemies rather than kill them. Captives were saved for the altars.

Then came the fun parts. The person to be sacrificed would be held spread-eagled by four priests on a stone slab. A fifth priest would rip open his or her abdomen with a flint knife. Then they would extract the beating heart, put it in a bowl. Sometimes they would lop off the victim's arms and legs and then throw the body down the temple stairs. Torture and beating were often administered followed by decapitation. There was so much blood, they had to build channels in the stonework to carry off all the blood. Everybody down at the bottom would stab and pierce themselves while dancing, beating drums and blowing whistles.

Nothing says "civilization" quite like
everyone sitting around naked
while eating your neighbors for lunch!

The body parts were disposed of and/or eaten by the priests and celebrants (yes cannabalism was quite popular in Meso-America). The warrior who captured the victim got all the meaty bits. The viscera was fed to animals in the Aztec zoological park. Heads were lopped off and stuck up on poles. Sometimes they wrapped victims up into a ball and kicked them around, playing some kind game with their bodies until they were dead. Aztec priests would often skin the victims while they were still breathing and dress themselves up in the skin of the victims (shades of Hannibal Lecter).

Sometimes when the Meso-Americans got bored cutting up naked people, they might shoot them with arrows till they looked like pincushions and slowly bled to death. Sometimes they played ball games and killed the losing team. They also burned victims alive, flayed them alive or drowned them. One inscription claims to have sacrificed 86,400 prisoners in just four days of carnage. Apologists for the Aztecs downplay that number to as low as 10,000, seemingly unaware of how appalling it would be to murder that many people deliberately in just four days.

And the Aztecs weren't alone in committing mass murder. The Mayans did it, using the same techniques. They were fond of disemboweling their living victims. There are huge sinkholes in the Yucatan Peninsula where they used to throw living victims to die slowly. The Incas in Peru liked to murder children. They would abandon them on mountains to die of the cold. Sometimes they just buried them alive. Great fun. It's been estimated that one in five children died every year on the sacrificial altars. That estimate comes from people who actually admire the Meso-American civilizations.

I can see why progressives would admire the Meso-American civilizations - an elite decadent ruling class and all those peons to slave away building pyramids and providing all that delightful serial killing for them. Apparently, I am told, I just don't understand them. After all their victims were dressed so nicely and they were told they'd go to heaven and be served by virgins and such.  Where have we heard that lately?

Historian Michael Harner estimated that some 250,000 Mexicas went to the altars annually. Apologists argue that 20,000 is more "plausible" as though somehow brutally murdering 20,000 people makes it all better. And this was going on centuries before Columbus ever got here.

Archaeologist are constantly digging up
Incan child sacrificial victims. The actual
toll of dead Inca kids may be worse than
anyone has previously thought.

People who blithely claim that white people beat that death toll really don't have a clue. I'm not excusing the Trail of Tears or the massacres by white vigilante groups. There's no excuse for what whites did, but the Indians were not without blame in the whole thing. Some of the tribes were little more than roving street gangs only they didn't have streets. They stole horses, children and women, wiped out whole villages and attacked farms and wagon trains.

There's plenty of blame to go around for everyone. Columbus may have been an arrogant European, but he was not solely to blame for the horrors that ensued. It could be argued that even Native Americans are rather better off than they were when Columbus arrived. They no longer live to the ripe old age of 29. They don't get swept up and brutally torture, dismembered and eaten by priestly perverts who enjoy that sort of thing.

The Aztec religion was the most blood thirsty in all pre-Columbian America. Others practiced human sacrifice but nobody was close to the Aztecs for cruelty and the efficiency of their mass murder. So when Cortez showed up, practically every neighboring tribe joined up with the Spaniards to put an end to the Aztec empire. If you think America would have been better off if Columbus had stayed away and left those bloodthirsty savages in charge to create a continent wide civilization, you have to be really indulging in an incredible level of wishful thinking and willful ignorance of how history works.

Anybody who looks at the impact of the "European Invasion" on the modern Americas, has to see that things are way better than they were under domination of the Meso-American civilizations and the tribal cultures of the hinterlands. The "civilizations" of the Americas where three or four millenia behind European civilization. Had Europeans stayed away altogether Americans would still be living possibly at an early Greco-Roman or even Persian level of civilization had they actually managed to advance at all. And given the level of ingrained bloodlust and perversion, I rather doubt there'd have been much of a chance of that.

All in all, Columbus may have done my native ancestors a favor. And native is probably a misnomer anyway given that they were immigrants themselves. So I think I will give a nod to old Christopher this Columbus Day. I encourage you to do the same.

© 2017 by Tom King

Should American Children Learn the Principles of Islam in History Class?

Even a fan of big brain central
planning like Isaac Asimov,
recognized the dangers of a
big bully wrecking the carefully
crafted central planning of society's
well-meaning mental superiors in
his "Foundation" sci-fi series. 

Todd Starnes over at Fox News has sparked a debate over the issue of whether kids should study Islam in public school, when he wrote a piece that documented parental outrage over their children being "forced" to learn the principles of Islam in a Tennessee public school. The Huffington Post shot back with a piece that pretty much distorted what Starnes actually said and glossed over the fact that the teacher in question had decided to "put off" the chapter on Christianity till the end of the school year as one parent claimed or told another parent that it was "against school policy" to discuss Christianity in school.

Starnes' point was that the teacher in question had a double standard where teaching about religions in a history class was concerned, not as HuffPo accused the Fox commentator, that Christianity should be taught in public schools and not Islam. Starnes, in his column, wasn't calling for Bible classes down at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School. As usual, liberals muddy up the issue, call conservative hypocrites and then declare themselves a moral victory, thus claiming an unearned moral high ground for themselves. Speaking of junior high school, does anyone else think that sounds suspiciously like "Nanny, nanny, boo, boo." I don't know about you, but the Huffing and Puffington Post piece feels just like one of those playground bully that used to smack down the littler kids and claim the kingship of the playground for himself on the basis of his being genetically larger than everyone else.

Look, as to the issue of teaching about Islam in a high school or junior high school history class, I've got no problem with that. I think an examination of Islam's fundamental beliefs by school children would be quite useful - at least as part of history class. 

"Know thy enemy," I always say. In reading T.H. Lawrence's (yes THAT Lawrence; the one from Arabia) "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" I came to an understanding of Islam that further convinced me that my "nutty" conservative political beliefs were dead on. Knowing the cultural background of Islam and the principles taught by Mohammed has made the Middle East all too frighteningly understandable. 

We have been trained to wonder after power and pomp.

Were I a teacher again, I would definitely introduce Islam's tenets to my students, in hopes that, with all else they know about history and their own culture, they might at least put up a token resistance to the "fundamental change" that's being foisted upon America. A thorough understanding not only of Islam, but also of Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Revolution and the doctrine of the divine right of kings, just might open young eyes to see the Euro-Marxist invaders who have co-opted our government and somehow convinced the citizens of the greatest nation in the world so far, that it should be ashamed of itself. 

A clear understanding of where this whole collectivism disease is all coming from, would, I hope, convince young Americans that we should NOT quietly recede from the world stage and join a homogeneous socialist proletariat under the rule of our mythical European/African/Asian/Latin American betters. As regular readers of my blog know, I blame Walt Disney. I love Uncle Walt as an entrepreneur, but he is also responsible for teaching generations of kids that hereditary princes and princesses are better suited to governing nations than the people themselves. 

They don't mean the Hapsburgs, those European wastrel monarchs that decimated Europe for generations with their wars and taxes and castle-building when the collectivists talk about the special class of rulers. They mean Darwin's smart, strong people - those who made it big and have joined the social elite by virtue of their genetic superiority. The leftist actors, politicians, corporate elites, wealthy billionaires and academicians are busily teaching us that we are all not equal but the same and should submit to central planning and guidance. The guidence, of course, they mean to come from themselves, since, of course, they, being smarter, know what is best for us after all.

Islamists have a similar system in place. It's best that our kids know that and recognize the danger, if those of us who believe, not in collectivism, but in individualism are going to put up any useful resistance. In America, the government draws its power from the people. In most of the rest of the world, people believe they draw their rights from the government - the ancient European way. Brits draw their rights, they believe, from the queen. 

Check out any "People's" republic or democratic-republic you care to name and the principle is the same, and it is the same in Islamic countries. Sir Robert Filmer, an opponent of John Locke whose philosophy guided the foundation of the United States, stated quite clearly the monarchist's philosophy or the so-called "divine right of kings". Filmer said flatly, that we are all born slaves and designed by God to serve that special few whom God ordained should be our sovereigns. Locke took apart Filmer's argument block by block through logic, reason and scripture. Locke was a notable theologian in his own right as it turns out, hammering Filmer's theory from Scripture. 

When Locke's principles were inculcated into the US Constitution, monarchy and the idea of a divinely appointed hereditary "nobility" took a heavy blow. America appeared to enjoy the blessings of the Almighty rather than his curses. Meanwhile the divine kings and princes back in Europe were "governing" themselves into an inevitable decline thanks to their unceasing wars and wasteful spending. 

But thanks to Charles Darwin and the idea of evolution by natural selection or "Survival of the Fittest" as it came to be known, the ruling class found a new ally that supported the divine right of elites to rule.  According to Darwin, those who had clawed their way to the top of society, were, the simplistic argument went, the hereditary "fittest" and therefore, an elite class of humans fit to meddle in the affairs of "the lower classes" or as Marx called the unwashed rabble - the proletariat. 

Under Marx's vision, the world should return to a two-class system and the troublesome bourgeouise middle class would be conveniently absorbed into harmlessness as part of the new collectivism. There they would serve the state - meaning those who are already running things, instead of selfishly looking out for themselves and their families. The only problem (and the fat cats, for some reason, never see it coming), there's always some megalomaniac lunatic out there ready to seize the machinery of collectivism and proceed to exploit the "everybody serves the state" mentality that's been created by the well-meaning social elites. Then said strongman merely redefines the state to mean "myself" and then robs, rapes and murders the intelligentsia that gave him his power in the first place. 

Individualists do not last long under the "divine right" of the elites system at whatever stage it happens to be at. That said, there is also the law of unintended consequences at play here. The argument is always made that socialism or communism or monarchism or whatever it calls itself, didn't work before because "we didn't have the right leader". They assure us with great fanfare and lots of symbols and logos that this latest version of the "Dear Leader" will give us the hope and change utopia we all long for. The trouble is that if you give any state that much power over the so-called masses, it is inevitably run by some class of bully. 

Those who represent the bully state may, in-fact be well-meaning bullies, but any time bullies demand that everybody submit their will to themselves, the all-powerful state thus created is always vulnerable to the rise of a bigger, more dangerous bully. Isaac Asimov, who was actually a fan of letting the smart guys plan everyone's future, recognized that an unforeseen big bully might wreck even the carefully laid plans of well-meaning smart people when he introduced "The Mule" character into his "Foundation" series. He recognized that vast centralized power can be a dangerous thing, even in the hands of nice guys and that the best-laid plans, as Scots poet Robert Burns aptly put it, "Oft-times gang agley."  They can, and probably will, given the lust for power that runs in the human race

That's why, I think that learning about how a bully like Mohamed took over the Arab culture via the drumming of a set of fundamental beliefs into the minds of his people, is a useful educational exercise. I think an honest study of comparative religions could be a very instructive for what Rush Limbaugh calls "young skulls full of mush".  Don't get me wrong, I also think that comparative study should be America-centric. I don't mind investigating where Christianity went wrong while you're at it. The governmentalization of faith under the Roman church was a huge mistake and one that seems it is trying to repeat. There were good reasons for the Protestant rebellion. Those should be studied too, because the inform the history that followed, from the Spanish Armada, the bloody history of South and Central America to the reasons for the American Revolution. All these help us understand why the rise of the United States became the most earth-shaking thing to hit history since the Flood.

The brilliance of our founding fathers was in their structuring of the government of the new nation into three equal branches, each of which acts as a balance to the other, preventing any one branch from getting too big for its britches. It makes for a woefully inefficient system of government with a whole set of problems all its own, but if you paid any attention in history class when you were a kid, you realize that an "efficient" government is usually most efficient at murdering dissenters among the people it "serves".  

And when I talk about history class, I don't mean the revisionist double-think version of history our leftist academia has foisted upon an unsuspecting generation of young Americans. I mean history - the kind you dig out of books written by those that history actually happened to. History unvarnished and uninterpreted for you. That's the sort of dangerous thing Huffpo and other liberal pundits would like to see eliminated. It's dangerous to allow kids to learn from source material. It requires them to learn to think for themselves. And that threatens the Progressive movement to no end, for without the proper interpretation of history by those in authority, kids might not realize that they are naturally born to slavery and to serve their betters as part of a collectivist state.

And we wouldn't want them to be squeamish about shooting individualists when the revolution comes, would we?*

Tom King - © 2015
* That was sarcasm by the way - for those of you from San Francisco, Rio Linda and any writers at the Huffington Post.

I Aim to Misbehave!

The great debate of our time appears to be over how to make people better. One side believes that you make people better by passing laws. The other side believes you make people better by changing hearts. One side believes you can coerce goodness from without. The other side believes you can only create goodness from within.

There is a book that clearly documents the inability of law, in and of itself, to make people better. It's called the Old Testament. The long march of history has confirmed time and again the impotence of law to make people better. 

Law can help define what is and what is not good, but it cannot make people better - even at the point of a sword or through the barrel of a gun. 

Goodness comes from an indwelling of the spirit of God which inexorably changes hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. It works no other way.

Utopia cannot be legislated. Goodness cannot be forced, however many legions of stormtroopers you bring to bear upon the matter. Every time a government arises "for the good of the people", history shows us that those who assume the leadership of those governments and take upon themselves the task of forcing their subjects to be well-behaved inevitably become monsters.

The United States is, essentially, a backward country compared to other countries of the world. Instead of our protection and our rights coming from government, our forefathers recognized that these things were our inalienable right and rather than needing kings and emperors to give its people these rights, instead it should be the people from whom the government should derive its privileges, powers and responsibility.

The US Constitution and Declaration of Independence marked a stunning change in world affairs, arresting for a time the power of princes and potentates. Unfortunately, those who would make themselves kings did not go away. They are still out there, chipping away at the great American Experiment, relentlessly seeking to regain the power to tell us all what we may do and to force us to obey.

I do not hold to that and when America falls back into totalitarian darkness once more....

I aim to misbehave.

© 2014 by Tom King

It's Sin Not Skin

Who Is to Blame for History's Atrocities?

I ran across this statement the other day and I'd like to respond to it. 

"Anglo men have murdered and enslaved almost everything they put their hands on in the development of western civilization because of their greed."

The statement was in response to a documentary the author had seen about how America treated the Hawaiians during the late 1800s. He then came to the conclusion, based on the record of Hawaii's annexation and eventual rise to statehood that Anglo men were responsible for most of the murder and enslavement that created Western Civilization. The idea is not his alone. It's a growing meme promoted by those who wish to enlist people of color in the march toward progressive socialism which is supposed to heal the damage done by Anglo Men.

The gentleman is wrong, however in his assumption. In all the history of the world, it's not just Anglo Men who have sinned against their fellow man in the march to power. Men of all races, who have lusted to who hold power over their fellow beings, have proven quite capable of the most unimaginable atrocities. Asian men, African men, Indian, Celtic, Native American, Hispanic, Scandinavian, Caucasian and even Polynesian and aboriginal men have inflicted horrific things on their fellow humans simply because they had the power to do so.

It's not about the skin color, it's about the condition of the soul beneath the skin. One wonders what might have happened had Ghengis Khan or Shaka Zulu or one of the Chinese Emperors managed to gain as much power and technological superiority over surrounding nations as did the British or even the Americans of the 1800s. We are already beginning to get an inkling of what Muslim nations are capable of when they get hold of power and weapons with which to murder their enemies.

It's a soul problem, not a skin problem. No race has yet managed to totally escape it. On the whole Western Civilization has managed to corral it's lust for mass murder as well as any civilization thus far. We have at least proven willing to sacrifice our own lives to stop mass murderers from doing what they do. Our record is spotty, sure, but not many other great nations have even tried to do the right thing.

Even the Crusaders did some decent things and many of them meant well and actually attempted to act in a Christian manner toward the natives of the Holy Land, despite the hatchet job the revisionist historians have done on them and the puffery extended by the liberal historians of the past hundred years toward their Muslim foes.

Western Civilization has only been capable of over-powering its enemies and forcing its will on others, because we have managed to accumulate more power. I don't think it's a race thing at all, unless you suppose that white people are smarter and better organized than other races. I personally, think that's a racist attitude. I believe that, ironically enough, it was because Christianity brought long periods of peace and prosperity to the Western world, that the Western World had the time and surplus energy to trade, innovate and develop the technical and financial strength to build great military strength ostensibly for peace.

As in all human civilizations, evil men among us have unfortunately used power for evil purposes as evil men will. In spite of that, Anglo nations like Britain, The United States, Canada and Australia are far from an axis of evil. Even South Africa, which was at one point a stain on Anglo-Saxon civilization, eventually gave up its evil ways to a large extent. This happened, not because people of color conducted communist guerrilla operations, but because the nation's white leadership came under an overwhelming barrage of international shaming, most particularly from their fellow white people. Eventually, their Christian upbringing kicked in and overcame their lust for power and apartheid ended, not with a bang but a whimper.

Arguably, one of the most devastating blows to South African apartheid was a concert tour by a white folk singer, Paul Simon, who demonstrated that whites and blacks could work together for a beautiful purpose and who showed the human side of apartheid's oppressed people to everyone in the world. The government got more grief after Simon's tour than it could bear from outraged fellow Anglos. Ironically, Simon took a lot of criticism from leaders of the black rebellion too. Why? Because he had not paid proper obeisance to them before he had the temerity to sing with African black musicians – a peek at the dangers coming with the change of leadership.

The damnation of Anglo Men, neglects to discuss nations such as China, the Muslim Nations and Russia whose human rights records are abysmal.

It's true that nobody has the same level of power as the Western Anglo Nations, but, the idea that white people are just naturally more evil than everyone else is rather racist if you ask me. We white Anglo men can't jump either – except for my friend Mike Maloney who, as my opponent on the basketball court seemed to have wings. For one to ascribe the propensity for evil to white men alone or even mostly, passes de facto judgement on an entire people strictly by the color of their skin. Does the "white men cause all the trouble in the world" faction really believe what they are saying is not racist?

And, given that the Anglo nations are also, by and large, predominantly Christian nations, that damns Christianity by association. Really, what are you trying to say? I mean white people are already wallowing in guilt now for things somebody else did a hundred years ago. I see precious few Chinese being taken to task for their nations history of human rights abuse or for that matter, Russia, Germany, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, India, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Chad, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Spain, Italy (the Romans were a pretty rough bunch) or any other nation, tribe or culture on the planet.

If other nations are so peace-loving, tell you what. Let's give all our guns, nukes, planes and warships to any nation of any color you care to - any nation in Africa for instance. Anybody want to do that? (Insert chirping of crickets here)

The only reason that Caucasian (not just Anglo) men ran so many big empires was the accident of technology. Nobody in the "white men are all bad" camp has yet suggested that it is because Anglos are smarter and make better weapons, grow more food to feed their troops and come up with better tactics to kick the butts of their enemies. That would be to acknowledge white superiority. What they are saying smacks of whining by the losing side because their opponents were smarter and stronger. 

Even I am not suggesting that white men are smarter, and I am one, so that idea would make me feel quite superior and like anyone else, I rather enjoy feeling superior. If you do support the notion that there's something about white genes that make us more willing to dominate and abuse other races, however, you might also have to entertain the notion that there is also something in our genes that makes us smarter, more organized and tech savvy than some other races.  

This is not my opinion. I want to make that clear. But such a notion could be extrapolated from the very same argument that white man's greed is the source of most of the human rights outrages in the world – which, in fact, they are not. The idea that most power has been in the hands of white folk is hardly accurate.

Look at the great empires.

·         Babylon - Semitic, not Anglo or Caucasian

·         Han Dynasty (China) - Asian not Caucasian

·         Persian Empire – Semitic and Caucasian

·         Greek Empire - Caucasian, not strictly Anglo

·         Roman Empire - Caucasian/African (the curly hair came from considerable mixing with Africans and other races of color along the Mediterranean.

·         Holy Roman Empire - Now those guys were mostly Saxon rather than Anglo

·         Charlemagne - Celtic/Gallic, not Anglo

·         Mayan Empire – Amerind (built channels to carry off the rivers of blood that ran from the altars of their pyramids during sacrificing season).

·         Aztec Empire – Amerind (ditto the Mayan rivers of blood plus a little)

·         Peruvian Empire – Amerind (no slouches at oppressing neighbours and human sacrifice – children were favorite subjects)

·         Spanish Empire - Hispanic, not Anglo with a good deal of African gene stock

·         British Empire - Anglo/Briton/Celtic/Saxon/Nordic

·         Napoleonic Empire - Gallic not Anglo

·         German attempts at empire – Saxon/Prussian Caucasians

·         Japanese Empire – Asian (they even considered the Chinese to be inferiors)

·         Soviet Union – Caucasian mostly not Anglo

·         Maoist China - Asian

·         American Hegemony – hardly an empire Anglo/Saxon/Celtic/Pictish/Italian/Irish/Greek/African/Asian/Amerind and whatever else you can think of.

Anglos are a decided historical minority in the world of big, abusive empire builders. America was, in point of fact, guilty of some atrocities like in Hawaii and among the Native American tribes. We ran arguably unjust wars against both Mexico and Spain who, in the case of Mexico, we left with their independence when it was over, got rid of an arguably awful dictator and paid them for the land we took at a time when they really needed the cash more than the land. Nobody, who lives in the lands the progressive left claims that we stole from Mexico, wants to be given back to Mexico. The Spanish American war left us with the Philippines and Cuba and the odd island, but we gave those back to their people for better (in the case of the Philippines) or for worse (in the case of Cuba). We also rescued the Philippines when the Japanese overran them in WWII at great cost, then gave them their independence and piled on the financial aid that helped them achieve it. We only kept Puerta Rico and some Pacific Islands as protectorates, because they didn't want to go and they still don't. They like being Americans

And while we're talking atrocities, the Japanese committed some doozies in WWII. We managed not to hold that against them, to rebuild their nation and to make them a major trading partner. Same with the Germans. The African nations have taken slaughter to a particularly hideous level lately. The Muslim nations have pretty much proclaimed jihad against everybody. The Sri Lankans are at each other's throats all the time. Hindus in India used to keep special villages where they fed everyone right up until they went in and harvested a few to use in particularly barbaric sacrificial rituals. Mao starved millions of his own people, not counting the millions murdered in political prisons. The Russians really whacked off a lot of folks in Stalin's day. The Cambodians had the killing fields. Oh, there's plenty of responsibility for atrocity to go around.

Yes, some Americans committed atrocities against native Americans (who were not entirely blameless in the conflict) and Hawaiians (no strangers to violence against one another when they happened to be the stronger of the two opposing sides). We feel so bad about what a few Americans did more than a century ago, that Congress still cannot pass a Congressional appropriation without adding some special money in it for native Americans. 

While it was American white males, who have been responsible for most of the atrocities committed in our name, it must also be remembered that it was white American males who provided most of the manpower to put a stop to it - often at shattering costs. The sacrifices made by white American soldiers during the Civil War in fighting and dying to end slavery should count for something toward expunging their forefathers' guilt. White soldiers also fought hard to stop Hitler and Tojo and to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan and to try and prevent Communist aggressors from over-running South Vietnam. However badly their commanders mishandled those conflicts or race relations within our forces, Anglo males did do their part to try and protect people who were being persecuted, murdered and exploited. 

Of all the armies in the world, it is American armies that have long stood up to the truly evil guys in the world. When we defeat even the most evil of enemies, we make peace, then rebuild their country, and give it back to them. No other nation in the whole of history has done that as consistently as the nations of Anglo men. Considering where our civilization came from, I don't think we've done too badly with this one. And we pretty much constantly beat ourselves up for not doing a better job of it. 

If one looks at the past history of the Hawaiian Kings, themselves – the ones who inspired the harsh judgment of Anglo men in general that this article led with – the Polynesian kings can be shown to have committed plenty of atrocities themselves quite without the help of any white men at all. History notations pass over systematized extermination of your enemies and ritual human sacrifice as though it was a mere aberration and not the horror and perversion that such practice entailed. 

Delve into the history of any country you care to think of and you will find powerful men of every race and culture imaginable committing the most horrific atrocities. They may cloak it with the excuse of religion, humanity, social justice, Marxism. You name it and some human with power has done it, merely in the name of gaining and preserving his power. 

It is sin, not skin, my friend. Who is most to blame by virtue of their skin color is a political game played by those who would use our physical differences to divide us and conquer us for their own purposes. In reality, the color of the individual ordering atrocities is more a matter of who happens by chance, by theft or by dint of hard work to own the biggest guns, than it is the fault of their genes.

© 2014 by Tom King