The Gadsden Flag

Dear Subscribers, I have had my head buried in rewriting my latest work-in-process novel, changing the Point-of-View from close 3rd person to 1st person and taking advantage of the change of POV to better communicate what I feel is at the heart of the story. I’m 40% done with the rewrite which will go well into the winter. A visitor to the website brought me back here with a zeal to address current affairs. Although this site’s focus ranges from the Last Glacial Maximum in western Asia to the Mesoamerican cultures, it does range to our present age.

After reading post 21 Character Matters, which I wrote five years ago, visitor Axel Hernborg suggested I link his site to that post. After reviewing and diving deeper into his site and its links to 19 of the World’s Best World War II Museums and Historical Sites, I was inspired to update post 21 by linking it to current events in my own country at this time. Big and dangerous things are happening again, and they stem from a profound ignorance of the history of the past century and the valuable lessons found in Western Civilization.  

I am appalled at the division within my country, the USA. We are at a crossroads. Some recognize it as a Cold Civil War. Many of us believe we dodged a bullet in the 2016 election for president, while others had set their hearts on transforming the USA from a constitutional democratic republic to an “administrative state” in which an elite of Mandarin-like bureaucrats would map out and force us to live by their standards. To do so would require us to scrap the freedoms enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution written in the 18th century, and with them the Bill of Rights and rule of laws (not men) that makes the USA different from all other countries in the world.

The core issue is whether we will continue to be a nation of individuals enjoying personal freedom covering thought, property, privacy, speech, morals, religion, association, work, and self-defense under a system of common laws developed over the past two millennia. We expect enforcement constrained by laws written by popularly elected and re-elected officials in a constitutional republic. This model has been respected by the world, as witnessed by the long-standing desire of so many to join us.

The alternative government proposed by most of academia and descendants of the century-old progressive party whose first elected president drew us into World War One, the Versailles Treaty which made World War Two inevitable, and created an enormous self-serving class of professional politicians who wish to rid themselves of the influence of the hoi polloi. The only way these “progressives” can free themselves of the noisome hoi polloi is to undermine the constitutionally regulated election process. Their attack on the constitutional protections of the election process and preventing runaway governance by fiat is an all-out attack on the duly elected president and the platform which that nasty hoi polloi elected him to implement under the strict standards of the U. S. Constitution. These progressives toy with the laws.

We now live in a lawless world of “political correctness” and intolerance of debate, for progressive arguments cannot stand the light of day, nor the light of the U. S. Constitution, or the Bill of Rights, or the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

Countries in Europe are in the throes of a cold civil war as they discover how difficult it is to remove themselves from the progressive “administrative state” they themselves set up in the well-meaning but poorly-conceived European Union—the result of a poor understanding of World War II and its causes which had devastated them. From our shore, it looks like their “administrators” have trapped them in a spider’s web of supposedly irrevocable entanglements and thus usurped these countries’ sovereignty over their own people and destinies. Most urgent, just as “Old Europe” fell to invaders from the Eurasian Steppes four millennia ago, so “Today’s Europe” and Western Civilization are being assaulted by another eastern invasion and betrayed by a self-hating, suicidal administration by those progressive “administrators.”

In the United States, knowledge of their country’s and world’s history has been lost to students within the eroded public educational system from kindergarten through the universities. This is not due to general incompetence of educators, but through an ever-diminishing curriculum and escalating hostility to the country within the progressive movement since the early 20th century. The most visible damage is in the unconstitutional “political correctness” movement and the selective blindness of recent graduates toward the country’s three foundational documents (linked above).

To my readers, I submit that there are excellent free resources.

Regarding the “political correctness” movement encouraged by the Progressives,  I suggest a close reading of the Bill of Rights (see above link).

Regarding the paucity of knowledge of World War II, I suggest the following free course offered by Hillsdale College: “The Second World Wars“ taught by Victor Davis Hanson and Larry P. Arnn. Then recommend it to those around you.

Hillsdale College also offers many other free courses, so take a look at the full list of Hillsdale free courses.

Regarding the implications of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, I suggest you investigate the free course offered by Hillsdale College in the above list.

And no, I have no stake in Hillsdale other than wishing them well in their efforts to educate people who didn’t get any sense of history from their soul-less education.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke