Kipling wrote this at the end of World War I because he had witnessed the lies and the effects of the progressive agenda. Millions were dead, and he wanted to warn others of how it always began and how it ended. Here are the last few stanzas, after the collapse of society:
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That all is not gold that glitters and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to its vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
AS WE SEARCH FOR TRUTH, LET’S REMEMBER FIRST WHO WE ARE
America’s history with slavery is an abomination. Frankly, the people back then were monstrous. How could they not be? It may not have been in their home, or even in their neighborhood, but they knew it was going on. The food they ate and the clothes they wore were picked and made by slaves. They may not have been able to hear the lash and crack of the whip, but all they had to do was think about it. They refused.
We should now, in this century, judge and condemn them. It is important to do so, to set ourselves apart and signal our virtue, because just as this generation has passed judgment on the past generations, we, too, will be judged and condemned by our children’s children. “How could they possibly have cared about some entertainer who tweeted stupid stuff? Or spent days going back and forth online asking: Do you see a blue dress, or is it gold? They knew the food they ate and the clothes they wore were picked and made by slaves.” Or is it different now somehow?
Judge the Founders and we, too, shall be judged. Why are we not today leading the charge to free the slaves that are currently in chains? There are more in bondage today than in the entire four-hundred-year period of the Western slave trade COMBINED. What people now say about the Founders is just as true about us today. We “may not be able to hear the lash and crack of the whip,” but all we have to do is google it.
#slaveryisoutofcontrol #hashtagsdontcountasdoingsomething
I can see my ratings minute to minute. I know that every time I speak about freeing slaves, my ratings go down. I have shared stories of the way the radicals now fund their diabolical plans: organ harvesting. We have taken two cells off the streets when we kicked in the doors of their “surgery center.” These are Christian, Yazidi slaves and even Muslim orphans who have more value as parts than people. My programmers beg me not to talk about it.
Be careful of asking the honest question here, because once you hear the answer, you are going to be faced with “the choice.” The question is: Why?
Answer: Because all of those who have been “oppressed by a statue” are selfish, self-centered crybabies and cowards, and the rest of us are too comfortable in the belief that by expressing our outrage toward these crybabies we are doing our part.
The choice: Dogpile with outrage over my answer and do nothing, or do your own homework, find the truth for yourself, and let’s work together and stop slavery today.
GETTING OFF OUR HIGH HORSE AND BEHIND THE PLOW HORSE
It is difficult to not embrace outrage when you see people talk about oppression of women and yet do nothing to help the woman in Saudi Arabia who just received the right to drive. Well, so far, only twelve of them. And only with their husbands’ permission, and with a male in the car at the time. It is so comfortable and satisfying to say, “Sure, let’s talk about the oppression of the hierarchy against women.”
“There need to be more women on the boards of corporate America.”
“How dare you say there is any difference between a man and a woman?” Oh. Well, if there isn’t, why do we need to have women running companies or the country? “I will tell you this: America would be a different place if a woman were president.” Well, I happen to agree, but that means that women are different from men in meaningful ways.
Fun? You bet. But it doesn’t move anything forward. What if we assumed our goal was to find the truth and then use it as a tool to make things better? If we did that, we would stop the nonsense and help women in truly meaningful ways today.
I met with the leadership of GLAAD a few years ago in my offices in NYC. It was at the time that Putin was revoking the driver’s licenses of homosexuals in Russia, and the rumor was that there were areas where gay men were just “disappearing.” Speculation was that they were being arrested at night and taken to a warehouse and slaughtered. At the same time, ISIS and the government of Iran were throwing homosexuals off the roofs of ten-story buildings or hanging them two by two in the streets. I asked GLAAD to join me—I knew at the expense of my audience, who would not hear anything other than “Glenn Beck teams with GLAAD,” a group that they would feel was a fraud and only in business not to actually help people embrace freedom and diversity but to silence and bully all who stood in the way of GLAAD’s agenda. After forty minutes of trying to reason, I could not get them to talk about anything other than wedding cakes. They were everything my audience suspected. It is too bad they couldn’t see beyond the oppression of no groom-and-groom wedding cake toppers in a handful of bakeries. Perhaps if they could, they would have heard the screams of those being tortured and killed by many of the regimes they strongly support.
Look, all of us have in our human nature a switch that helps us filter things like this, or we would not survive. The actual atrocities of the world? It is just too much to think about. In Poland, much of what kept the communities from helping and hiding Jews was not the fear of opening the curtains at the sound of a truck stopping in your neighborhood. It was the fear that what you had heard was true. You didn’t want to know, because then you would have had to take action or live with the knowledge and shame.
How many times during the last Winter Olympics did we all talk about the pretty North Korean cheerleading squad? They are all slaves. Many of the last squad were rounded up and taken to a slave labor camp because on their return, they spoke about things they liked about the West. We speak of the North Korean missiles as if this is what makes them dangerous. We never speak of the horrors that are happening to the millions in concentration camps.
Should we not be actively encouraging one another to every day take another step toward the window to see what is happening to our neighbors? As in all things, we have to admit it first. Surrender to the truth and then take action.
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Who Are We as a Nation?
So now, let’s begin answering some of those questions: Is America Good or Bad?
Americans are currently split on many questions, but I believe that this one question is at the heart of our deepest and possibly mortal split. The way we answer this collectively makes the other answers we need either a little easier to find or irrelevant.
In the broadest brushstrokes: The right sees us as the knight in shining armor, who, yes, has done some bad things, but they are in the past and let’s stop harping about it, get over it, I didn’t have anything to do with it, and it is time to stop apologizing for everything. The left sees this as jingoistic, flag-waving nonsense at best, and as racist at worst.
The left is the exact opposite. They see a nation that has done some truly wicked things, all the while claiming that it was the “Christian nation,” defender of the little guy, human rights, peace, and prosperity. Sure, there have been some good things, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. The r
ight sees this as anti-God and anti-American.
So, which of these is true?
Winston Churchill is one of my favorite men for several reasons. The obvious one is that without him, the West would have fallen to the Nazis. He was not afraid speak his mind, to stand alone. To fail while daring greatly, admit his failures, and pick himself up and try again. Under great pressure, he would not be silenced in his refusal to believe “the German lie,” because of which he was kicked out of both parties and sent home. Until the world caught up to his warnings. He indeed never gave up and never gave in. It did not matter what they said about him; he kept moving forward.
To understand him, you need to see him as the young boy sent to boarding school. Even though his father was close to the school, Winston rarely saw his father, whom he wanted to impress. While at school, Winston dropped his pocket watch, a gift from his father, into the creek. He spent days searching for the watch, eventually digging a bypass and building a dam so he could examine the dry creek bed. When he eventually found it, he brought it into town and at great personal expense had it repaired and restored. When his father was told by the headmaster about the extraordinary lengths to which Winston had gone to find the watch, he only replied, “It is just like him to drop something like that.”
When World War II was over and England and her allies were free, largely due to Churchill’s vision, tenacity, and clarity, the people voted him out in the next election. The election shouldn’t have been a shock to anyone. With the people needing to rebuild their lives, the socialists promised help. Winston was a symbol of rugged individualism. He despised socialism, calling it the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. He knew that the Communists and Soviets were not allies but enemies of a free people, but those same people were tired; they had just endured two world wars and could not fathom a third. They had gone back to where they were before, unwilling to listen to Winston “beat the drums of war.” But Churchill wasn’t the one to decide. If Churchill had been president of the United States, Poland would have been free of not only the Nazis but also the Soviets. He was the icon of the attitude of keeping calm and carrying on. He was a prolific writer, painter, and father.
His words could have been said today: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
And then, just as you think you know him, as Johann Hari writes, he is truly a great man, unless you are from India, or Irish Catholic, or from Africa. As colonial secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland’s Catholic civilians, and when the Kurds rebelled against British rule, he said, “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. . . . [It] would spread a lively terror.”
His history in India is truly horrifying. So, which was he, hero or villain? His moral outrage at Nazism and the brutal thugs of Stalin’s Russia was clear and convincing. Was it all a lie? Churchill was, after all, the man who invented Iraq, as Hari writes, “Locking together three conflicting peoples behind arbitrary borders that have been bleeding ever since. He is the Colonial Secretary who offered the Over-Promised Land to both the Jews and the Arabs—although he seems to have privately felt racist contempt for both. He jeered at the Palestinians as ‘barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung,’ while he was appalled that the Israelis ‘take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.’ ”
So, which is he? Both cases are compelling. If you only know the wartime Churchill, he is a great hero; yet at the same time, if you only know the colonial Churchill, the case is clear: He was a monster.
Which Churchill is the real Churchill, and which do we ignore?
America is a horror show. We imported slaves, bought and sold them, and legally considered them property. We took land from Native Americans that we had promised was theirs. We rounded them up and herded them cross-country, like cattle, to holding areas.
Yes, America has a lot of skeletons in its closet. But it’s worse than you think.
Let’s start with America’s complicated and lopsided relationship with Native Americans. Most Americans generally recall the shameful Trail of Tears, in which more than twelve thousand Cherokee Indians were forced from their homes in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi and marched halfway across the country to new land in Oklahoma. An estimated five thousand Cherokee died along the way.
It’s a terrible injustice, but it’s even worse when you consider the details of the forced relocation, the parts that people don’t often remember from school (assuming they learned about the Trail of Tears at all, which isn’t a given). The Supreme Court upheld the right of the Cherokee to remain in their home territory in Georgia. Congress did not pass a law mandating their relocation. Instead, they had an enemy, one of the most despotic presidents in U.S. history, and a genuine hater of Indians—Andrew Jackson.
Jackson established his credentials as an Indian fighter during his days as a U.S. Army general. In 1818, President James Monroe sent Jackson to attack Seminole Indians near the Georgia/Florida border. The Seminole raided white settlers’ farms in the area and were known to harbor runaway slaves. Florida was still Spanish territory, so Jackson did not have specific permission to attack across an international border. But that was no big deal for a man like Jackson. He rushed into Florida, defeated the Seminole raiders and captured their chiefs, then proceeded all the way to Spanish Florida’s capital of Pensacola. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had opened negotiations with Spain for the U.S. to potentially acquire Florida, but Jackson attacked Pensacola and seized Florida by conquest.
Bet you didn’t remember that Florida became a state because Andrew Jackson waged war on the Indians there and, while he was at it, just decided to take Florida from Spain. There was nothing remotely legal about his outlandish actions, yet neither President Monroe nor Congress did anything to correct the incredible situation. They just kept Florida! Jackson never suffered any consequences either. He would grace America with the same audacity as president eleven years later.
As revenge, Florida now ends up a torturous swing state in every presidential election.
Battles between the U.S. Army and Native Americans, particularly in the West, raged on for decades as settlers and railroad tracks spread across the continent. The broken treaties and promises by the U.S. government culminated in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee.
The U.S. Army had pursued Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers for years. When they finally caught up to him at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, his followers tried to resist his arrest, and in the scuffle Sitting Bull was shot and killed.
Two weeks later, the army surrounded another band of Sioux who were participants in the Ghost Dance. The Sioux believed that if they religiously performed the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white man, the gods would favor them, restore them to their land, and destroy all nonbelievers. The army arrived, demanding the Ghost Dancers surrender their weapons.
No one knows for certain who fired the first shot. There are various possible culprits: a trigger-happy soldier, a panicked Sioux. A fierce firefight erupted, but the army had far superior firepower. When the dust settled and the smoke cleared, 150 Sioux warriors, women, and children lay dead, and another 50 had been wounded. The army counted 25 dead soldiers and 39 wounded. Some estimate that 300 to 400 Sioux were actually killed. Regardless, it was a massacre.
Adding insult to this atrocity is that 20 army soldiers were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their roles in this “battle.” That is more than the number of Medals of Honor awarded for any single battle during World War II. The U.S. government’s message was clear—the soldiers were the good guys.
The U.S. government’s mistre
atment of Native Americans is certainly one of the main talking points from the left when they want to take down America. But it’s not the main one. That would be slavery. That’s not to say that slavery isn’t every bit the stain on our nation that the left says it is—it’s just that conservatives generally have a different approach to the healthiest way to admit the severity of this stain while still moving forward.
We have addressed Jefferson and slavery, but go back to the Founding Fathers for a moment, because that’s where the left likes to start in dismantling and discounting the Founders’ accomplishments. “Founding Fathers” is a general label that encompasses a large group of men, but they didn’t distribute official “Founding Fathers” membership cards, so let’s define who we’re talking about here. We’ll narrow it down to the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Of the fifty-five Convention delegates, twenty-five owned slaves. George Washington owned slaves. So did Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration of Independence.
As remarkable an accomplishment as the Constitution is, the Founders ultimately blew it when it came to slavery. Though many of the delegates were adamantly opposed to slavery, the Convention determined that to keep the nation intact and enable a strong central government, they would not resolve the slavery question. Big mistake. Their lack of conviction created a mountain of trouble and pain for the young nation when the Civil War began barely seventy-five years later. They set America on a disastrous course of racial strife and violence that would stretch over the next 180 years.
And all that was thanks to what the Constitution failed to do. The U.S. Supreme Court made it even worse.
First, the infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared slaves were not, and could not become, U.S. citizens. The Court said in essence that slaves were property. That’s not helpful. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote the majority opinion. Guess who appointed Taney to the Supreme Court? His good buddy Andrew Jackson.