by Bill Buppert
It’s that time again.
Today is the 252nd anniversary of the “shot heard ‘round the world” at Lexington and Concord. The British regulars who started the fracas were following an age old government tradition of seizing powder, munitions and property for a pretentious King who had assumed such wide distribution of the tools of resistance should be available only to the government approved groups such as soldiers despite the danger on the frontier. We celebrate that time of defiance against tyranny when for sixteen years (1775-1791), all thirteen colonial provinces and the thousands of rural polities that exited outside or alongside the framework enjoyed a freedom they had not previously had and after 1791 would become enslaved once again under the totalitarian doomsday machine known as the Constitution.
The lobster-backs and British taxing regime would be replaced by a domestic variety of even more extreme virulence whose sole safety mechanism was a constant western diaspora trying to escape the clutches of the “Republic”.
The whitewashed history since then has lionized the inauguration of the divorce from the United Kingdom on this day and mistakenly links these events to all the “freedom” enjoyed under the Constitution. The Federalist coup in 1787 that reestablished an English-style yoke of central planning, national taxation and slight tinkering with indentured servitude to a kinder and gentler tax and regulatory apparatus did no more grant individual freedom than the Romans gave to conquered lands.
Welcome to the War Zone
By Nathan Barton
Is it soup yet? Are we there yet? Are we at war yet?
Of course, we ARE at war and have been, pretty much continuously since about 1940 or so. (Yes, I realize that Congress did not declare war until 8 DEC 1941, but the US had been a de-facto ally and co-belligerent of the British Empire for some time.) We are fighting in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Yemen, and probably in Libya, South Sudan, Ukraine, and maybe a few other places that we might not find out about for years, if ever. (By “we” I mean the Fed Gov, and those of the Fifty States (most, as I understand it) who gladly send their own troops (National Guard) to those places.
But there is war, and there is war. Even (despite their names) the then-United States really was not significantly in harm’s way in the Great War (World War I) or the Second World War -that mixture of the Great Pacific War and the Second Great War (and a few others). Neither Hawaii nor Alaska – the only states in which there was actual combat in WW2 – were part of the Union then. And a few saboteurs, fire balloons, and sub-sightings do NOT constitute what anyone would call war. Instead, we sent millions of people and billions in treasure – the fruits of the labors of tens of millions and the resources (vegetable, animal, and mineral) of our continent around the world to be destroyed and destroy.
But at home, what? The major source of deaths in the Forty-eight States at the time were in military training accidents and industrial accidents. Virtually NO one was killed here as a direct result of enemy action. Continue reading →