Category Archives: History

Battle Of Gettysburg

Founding Fathers, History, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, States' Rights, War

How cavalier we have become about the structure of liberty bequeathed to us by our American Founding Fathers, the greatest revolutionaries that have ever lived. (No it was not Nelson Mandela, the West’s secular, statist saint, whose organization’s founding document was communistic to the core.)

Th English Lord Acton, “the great historian of liberty,” wrote poignantly to Robert E. Lee in person to praise the General for fighting to preserve “the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will”: states’ rights and secession.

General Lee’s inspired reply to Lord Acton:

…I believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people…are the safeguard to the continuance of a free government… whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, [my emphasis], will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.

Lee opposed slavery. He was fighting for Virginia.

One hundred and fifty years ago, those fighting to preserve the republic’s decentralized structure against the force of “The Great Centralizer” lost a defining battle at Gettysburg, in the War of Northern Aggression. About the Battle of Gettysburg:

… Lee’s reputation had now grown to the point that he and his army had become a major source of national unity in the Confederacy. Civilians as well as soldiers looked to him for leadership and inspiration, rather than to Davis’s problematic government. With his authority at its height, Lee convinced Confederate officials to approve another northward excursion. Always reluctant to fight on fronts not directly related to Virginia’s defense, he argued against sending his men to reinforce besieged Vicksburg, Mississippi. In June 1863, after reorganizing his army, he moved up the Shenandoah Valley (where he fought and won the Second Battle of Winchester), through Maryland, and into Pennsylvania. Lee welcomed the fresh foraging, and again hoped to cripple Union morale by delivering a knockout punch that would win peace on Confederate terms.

The battle that resulted was fought at Gettysburg for three days from July 1 until July 3, 1863. The first day’s contest began as an incidental cavalry encounter and escalated as both sides augmented their forces. By evening, Lee’s men—including forces under Confederate generals A. P. Hill, Richard S. Ewell, and Jubal A. Early—had driven their opponents outside Gettysburg, but the Union troops made a prescient decision to retreat to high ground south of town. Lee also recognized the value of these heights and ordered Ewell to take a critical rise called Culp’s Hill, but he failed to provide Ewell with either the precise instructions or the reinforcements needed to gain a success.
Title: Confederate Dead at Gettysburg

The next day, Lee determined to attack the Northern forces, despite the misgivings of his lieutenants, including Longstreet, in particular. He had two serious disadvantages. Under generals George G. Meade (who had taken command of the Army of the Potomac a few days earlier) and Winfield Scott Hancock, the Union line had been strengthened overnight by entrenchments and an ingenious fish-hook formation that allowed for easy reinforcement of its weaker sections. Lee’s second problem was a lack of information. Cavalry general J. E. B. Stuart, who served as the eyes and ears of Lee’s army, was absent (with Lee’s approval) on an extended expedition, foraging and harassing Union troops away from the front lines. Lee had hoped for an early morning attack on both the Union right and left flanks, but the shortage of reliable intelligence caused delays, misguided marches, and unexpected exposure to Union fire. Despite spirited fighting by Longstreet’s corps at critical spots such as Little Round Top and Devil’s Den, the Union line held.
Title: View Slideshow

The following day, Lee stubbornly continued his attack. Confederates nearly seized Culp’s Hill but fell back when Union troops rallied in a do-or-die defense. Late in the afternoon, Lee ordered a massive assault against the Union center, again overriding his subordinates’ objections. Poorly organized and facing formidable defensive works, the 12,500 men in Pickett’s Charge were repulsed at tremendous cost. As the routed Confederates streamed back to their lines, Lee acknowledged his responsibility. “It is all my fault,” he told his shattered men. The next day he began a tortuous ten-day retreat to Virginia, and, to Lincoln’s chagrin, was able to salvage his army.

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A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma

America, Ancient History, Barack Obama, Bush, Ethics, History, Islam

“A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… While dhimmis contemplate what to do with the decaying corpse of a Muslim mass murderer, consider what General Sir Charles James Napier counseled about the valiant defense of Western values. The general (on an admittedly imperial mission to India) was confronted with the local Hindu practice of Sati, “the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband.”

When “Hindu priests complained to him,” as Wikipedia tells it, “about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities,” Napier replied:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

In the West, we do not dispose of the dead on open-air funeral pyres, as is still done in India, Bali, south of Indonesia, and Nepal. But we do cremate. Cremating Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s remains is commensurate with what ought to be American values: It conserves resources and leaves (almost) nothing behind.

Incinerate Tsarnaev’s corpse. It’s the moral thing to do.

It matters not that “Islam strictly forbids cremation.” True Christians and Jews forbid the murder of innocents. Those are the values that trump Islam.

Besides, Islam is a highly derivative (and distorted) belief system. Tamerlan believed that “the Bible was a cheap copy of the Koran.” However confused Muslims like him are about historical chronology, they do claim to accept the Ten Commandments, bequeathed in the Hebrew Bible’s Exodus and Deuteronomy, centuries before Muhammad. If so, the Sixth Commandment is unequivocally clear: “Thou shalt not kill.”

He who kills innocents has forfeited his right to religious burial rites—especially if these are to be administered by the killer’s victims. …”

The compete column is, “A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma.” Read it on WND.

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Communism Is Conducive To Cannibalism. What’s New?

America, Colonialism, Communism, History, Political Correctness, Private Property, Propaganda

Is communism conducive to cannibalism? Of course. Immoral systems give rise to more of the same. Food shortages and starvation are byproducts of communism. The rest follows as sure as night follows day. Taboos fall by the way when one is starving. The Plymouth pilgrims, circa 1623, abandoned private property for communal ownership of the means of production. They starved.

CNN:

Archaeologists revealed Wednesday their analysis of 17th century skeletal remains suggesting that settlers practiced cannibalism to survive.
Researchers unearthed an incomplete human skull and tibia (shin bone) in 2012 that contain several features suggesting that this particular person had been cannibalized. The remains come from a 14-year-old girl of English origin, whom historians are calling “Jane.”
Photos: Cannibalism evidence Photos: Cannibalism evidence
Scholar: Settlers ate each other
Studying the history of cannibalism
Cannibalism in colonial America?
There are about half a dozen accounts that mention cannibalistic behaviors at that time, although the record is limited, said Douglas Owsley, division head of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of National History.
The newly analyzed remains support these accounts, providing the first forensic evidence of cannibalism in the American colonies.

Good luck in finding a discussion of native culinary appetites and practices in the Americas. But now that archaeologists are implicating the Christian Jamestown settlers with cannibalism, you’ll never hear the end of it.

As was observed in “Rousseau’s Noble Savage – Not on this Continent”, “The Americas are scattered with archeological evidence of routine massacres, cannibalism, dismemberment, slavery, abuse of women and human sacrifice among native tribes. Why, the Northwest Territories Yellowknife tribe eventually disappeared as a direct result of a massacre carried out as late as 1823. …”

Still, I’d like to read a response to this news item from a real historian. Kevin Gutzman? Tom Woods?

Reflections On The Boston Bombers & Boyhood In America

Barack Obama, Constitution, Feminism, Founding Fathers, Gender, GUNS, History, Homosexuality, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Sex, Terrorism

“Reflections On The Boston Bombers & Boyhood In America” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Whereas American media has shed mostly darkness on the “apparently” mysterious motivation behind the ruthless, savage, April 15 attack on the Boston Marathon—a Chechen leader offered some valuable insights about these homegrown terrorists:

[The] Tsarnaevs … were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America.

The man makes a profound point. Here, and not in Chechnya, did the Tsarnaevs receive a liberal, lax, progressive education, emphasizing the wicked ways of the West and the righteousness of its “victims.” It is here in America that these invertebrates matured into aggrieved ignoramuses.

“If we Americans cannot even agree on what is right and wrong and moral and immoral, how do we stay together in one national family?,” prodded Patrick J. Buchanan, in a recent column.

“A common faith and moral code once held this country together. But if we no longer stand on the same moral ground, after we have made a conscious decision to become the most racially, ethnically, culturally diverse people on earth, what in the world holds us together?

The Constitution, the Bill of Rights? How can they, when we bitterly disagree on what they say?”

As Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam discovered, reluctantly, diversity in fact immiserates. The greater the diversity in a county or country, the more distrustful and depressed are its inhabitants.

America’s practically pornographic rituals of public grief—what are they if not a neurotic symptom of this disconnect? A diverse and distrusting people, lacking in a shared national DNA, are thrust together by the crisis of the day. In the absence of any core value over which to unite, we Americans meet on the only common ground we share: the graveyard. We come together to bury or remember our dead. We unite to grieve over tragedy and misfortune that have befallen us for no other reason than that we exist in the same space in time. ….”

Read the complete column. “Reflections On The Boston Bombers & Boyhood In America” is now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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