Liberty in America, Hating the Brits & The Fourth Turning.

This is a bit of a combination post and is intended to get a few things off my chest, and challenge the narrative. I will mince no words when I tell you that the state of things in this country right now appalls me. We have just had July the 4th and as a (former) Brit I have seen my share of dumb statements that drive me nuts.

Anyway, this is what I think: I will ‘recast’ for you the American Revolution. I know you won’t like it, because you have been reared on your own historical propaganda. In simple terms, the events surrounding 1776 were a civil war between the British Crown and Aristocratic landlords in the US, who were British. The colonies were British and had been for a couple of hundred years. The beginnings of America were British.

In the 1776 civil war, there were various actors. The British Regular Army, Hessian mercenaries, the Rebels, the Colonial Loyalists, and the French Navy. When Paul Revere made his ride, what he was actually yelling was “The Regulars are coming.” Not the British, because everyone was British.

When the Regulars marched to Lexington, they were met by British Colonial Militia. Yes, yes, farmers with guns blah blah, but they were actually a militia, trained to be able to fight with the weapons of the day. However, nothing should take away from the huge achievement of the rebels. I won’t go on here about that fact that Britain was involved in a huge war with France, and that a tiny percentage of combat power was only ever able to be given up to fight in the American colonies. For the colonies, this was a life and death struggle; for Britain, it was a sideshow. Same with 1814 etc: for Americans relating this on July 4th, it is everything, for the British Empire at the time it was nothing but a side-show to achieve specific political objectives. In short, there is a lot of American Hubris over events about 200 years ago, not really tied to any general awareness of world events at the time. Much of this can be traced to American ethnocentrism safe behind the ocean walls that protect this country. Consider this: Britain was involved in a total war with the French Empire, which was not concluded until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. By today’s standards, the relatively small taxes levied in the Colonies were to help pay for that war. It was extremely self centered for the Rebels to pick that time to conduct a revolution: and don’t forget the large number of Colonial Loyalists who stayed loyal. I have not studied it, but given the war in Europe, I am interested to know who it was that Britain sent to the Colonies as Regular troops in order to fight the rebellion. What was their standard? Were they green troops or hardened veterans who were sent for a needed rest? It’s an interesting point.

None of the above is to say that I don’t think that ultimately the events of 1776 – 1787, resulting in the founding of the original thirteen colonies of America as a separate united country, was a bad thing. It’s just important to look at it in it’s true light. My understanding is that a lot of loyalists moved to Canada – it’s pretty poor form that the US then tried to invade Canada! Consider also Washington’s put-down of the Whiskey Rebellion – how hypocritical. In fact, that makes you smell a rat at the very beginning of the formation of the country. It was about the first new American tax. Many of the rebels were war veterans who believed that they were fighting for the principles of the American Revolution; against taxation without local representation, while the new federal government maintained that the taxes were the legal expression of Congressional taxation powers. Basically, we are the new government now, so let us commence with exactly what we supposedly fought the British over! Beginnings of Federal Government overreach! It makes you wonder at the real motives of the Revolution, and whether in fact it was a Colonial Aristocracy throwing off ties with the Monarchy at home, in order to create a new one in America, albeit with a notionally Liberty-minded Constitution in place? Is it any wonder Americans have had to struggle to hold the line with Liberty ever since, and largely failed?

What this means, is that the Colonies were British in Nature, and the Founders were British. British guys like Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. It was Brits who created America. But America is no longer British, culturally or ethnically. Britain itself, despite being a great leader historically in the fields of Liberty going back to the Magna Carta, never had a written constitution. It is still officially a Monarchy. It is a great shame that the innovations of the USC, the written Constitution with the Bill of Rights, could not have migrated to the UK itself. The fact that the UK has an unwritten (evolved) constitution is what has ensured that there has never been any effective protection against tyranny. Such as with gun confiscation in the UK.

So the colonies evolved, after the Revolution (Civil War) into America with the written Constitution. It was the USC that set the stage for what is called American Exceptionalism. Well, that and the fact that other world powers were exhausted after WWII, and the US protected behind it’s ocean walls was able to step up to be a superpower. It is the Liberty which is laid down and protected in the USC that allowed for American Exceptionalism. Britain, for example never had protected Liberty, and has devolved into a socialist hellhole.

But the issue for me is not how much more free the US may be than the UK, which is where everyone always goes with this, but that the US is no longer free as it should be. America is supposed to be the Shining City on the Hill. It is only the existence of the Bill of Rights that has prevented mass gun confiscation here in the US. Those wonderful British Founders wrote that down, and it has staved off the excesses of statism since. But it is only the existence of the BOR that has prevented those statist excesses. It is certainly not the American people.

Over the last 240 years, it has been Americans who have failed to hold the line in terms of Liberty and the USC. No one else. As a legal (British) immigrant, I find this tragic. I find most of the US to be a simple psyop, this red white and blue costume wearing ridiculousness where everyone declares themselves to be free, but are in fact not. So long as we endlessly go on about being free, it will somehow make it true? There is something there though: due to ‘manifest destiny’ and the occupation of the whole of the current land mass of the United Sates – going from ‘These’ United States to ‘The’ United States, perhaps there was always something inevitable about the strangling growth of government. The Civil War in 1860 killed the Constitution by denying the Constitutional right of States to secede from the voluntary union of These United States; Lincoln was a tyrant. Post-WWII, when taking over the role of worlds policeman from the UK, and the subsequent Cold War, it almost makes you wonder if there was any room left at all for Jeffersonian Liberty? Could the Constitution cope with the vastness of the new America? Huge immigration by non-British-ethnic groups who perhaps did not see the value in Rightful Liberty and Individual Responsibility, which were concepts of the Enlightenment – or those immigrants were never truly allowed it once they did arrive? It seems like it could not.

I have been nothing but shocked at the authoritarian statist socialistic society that I have encountered in the US, that I observe daily. The idiotic political scene on both sides. The leftists appear to root for pie in the sky socialism (read communism) as if they have a mental illness. The ‘right’ is in some weird place where they cheer their own handcuffs. Everyone seems to want to tell everyone else what to do. What about Rightful Liberty?

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” Thomas Jefferson

What do I mean by my comments about ‘conservatives’? How about this whole ‘thin blue line’ thing? The whole ‘law enforcement’ thing is in a horrible place in the US. Do I think there should not be any police? No. I think we need Peace Officers; there are enough idiots in this modern society that we cannot rely on Individual Responsibility anymore, and need people to be involved full-time with policing those morons. Because:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams

The problem is that ‘law enforcement’ is there on paper to enforce the law, and if that is unconstitutional but enacted by lawmakers, they will do so, if they want to keep their jobs and pensions. If it is revenue collecting, or enforcement of malum prohibitum laws, or gun confiscation when it comes down to it. Potentially law enforcement is the future enforcement arm of a socialist authoritarian state, and as such would be at odds with Rightful Liberty. Or are they? I think a lot of that will depend on individual departments and where in the country they are from. It is well known than some States are ‘behind enemy lines’ as socialist ‘gun-free-zone’ hellholes. It is also true that there are a lot of police officers who support armed citizens. As the screws tighten, there will be some hard decisions for departments and individual officers.

Just look at the tax rates in this country, there to raise revenue for government and allow wealth redistribution for socialist welfare policies. Look at the fact that you can no longer own property in the US, due to property tax. This means you can never own anything outright, property or land, because you have to keep paying the Crown to be allowed to keep it.

Look at the constant infringements onto the Second Amendment, already in place and constantly coming. And what is worse is that whenever a possible infringement is enacted or announced as planned (Virginia, right now, looking at you): All people do is see how they can skate around it. The 2A is for the purpose of preventing tyranny, but it will never work , however many firearms are in private hands, if the country does not have the moral courage to stand up and stop that tyranny. It is just one line in the sand after another, never being acted on as each one is crossed.

I’m certainly not on the left, but neither am I on the ‘right.’ Does this make me an anarchist? I don’t think so. I just really dislike being coerced into anything. I want my Liberty, Rightful Liberty. Do I want no government at all? Probably not, because we have to be real about where we are in today’s day and age, and threats that we face. But I think government should be absolutely minimalist, an administrative function to keep essential services in play. For example, you can’t defend against the international threats we face today, with a country this size, with a part-time militia; you need some form of standing army, counter to what the Founders wanted, because of the day and age in which they lived. You need a place for professional soldiers and ‘train the trainers’ to exist in case of mass mobilizations. These are all practical matters. But minimalist government with very low flat rate taxes, that I would consent to, works for me. It’s one thing to be all anarchist, but I think we live in a world of realpolitik and we need to take account of that. ‘Voluntarists’ will be furious at me for this. But the truth is that I want my Rightful Liberty, and I want a return to the freedom that America should enjoy, but I am no political scientist and I cannot tell you what the ultimate working system should be to bring that about. Some of this, I just don’t know, or have not followed the logic all the way through to discover the best system.

I know that Americans are going to constantly tell themselves that they are the best at everything, which is hugely hubristic and has no empirical basis. Such as having the best military in the world. Really? In my opinion, it is not. It is definitely huge, and there is a huge military-industrial complex, and a lot of great technology. But a military reflects it’s society and American society is toast. I know that I recall that the British Army was far better tactically than the US Army will ever be, probably due to quality over quantity, better selection and training. But UK society is also toast, so I have no idea if that remains true. That is my opinion by observation. One thing about the US military is that it is so huge that it is a hideous bureaucracy, and also a social experiment. I genuinely fear for the result of a peer to peer conventional battle. No, I’m not saying that the US necessarily loses, but I fear the loss of life. When the better trained US formations such as Special Operations elements have been through the ringer, or are not deployed in theater due to strategic priorities, then you are back to the run of the mill US military with poor levels of training and priorities more to do with equal opportunities and sexual discrimination training than actual warfighting.

But here is the true tragedy. When I served in the British Military, and later as a contractor, I had no illusions about what I was doing. I am a professional soldier. In the UK, it is always couched in terms that the military serves the ‘National Interest’, which basically means the wishes of the government of the day. Nobody tells themselves that anything they do is helping to protect or increase freedom in the UK itself. Deploy to Helmand, Afghanistan? That is for the specific purpose of the National Interest such as reconstruction of Afghanistan, geopolitical reasons. But in the US, the psyop tells everyone that deployments to the Middle East are something to do with freedom in the US? It is tragic. No one doubts the sacrifice, but the military industrial complex does not give a crap. This makes American troops evangelists on deployments, for the greater cause of freedom in the US. Tie that in with poor cultural awareness of the world outside of America, the export of ‘Americana’ on deployment, and a huge amount of ‘othering’ of people in other parts of the word, and you have a recipe for atrocity. How absolutely bizarre! But, the psyop is a great way to get the sons (and daughters) of the country behind an endless war abroad. To me, it is a great tragedy that when these brave souls come home broken or dead, they still believe that they were somehow fighting for Liberty at home, when in fact they joined the professional legions to fight the Empire’s wars abroad – there is nothing wrong with that, but be honest with yourselves! Professional soldiering is a career, not an evangelical crusade for ‘Freedom’ in America.

Well, someone will tell me that we are fighting terrorism there and that keeps it out of the US, but in fact we created more insurgency / terrorists by being out there than there ever were before. The bottom line is that the primary reason we are there is for the National Interest, be that oil, strategic positioning, etc. Am I saying we should not be there? Not necessarily. Maybe we do need to go to war with Iran – but the point being, that has nothing to do with Liberty / Freedom in the US. These are separate things. In fact, since 9/11, everything has been about reducing domestic liberty, such as the Patriot Act, and as such the wars since have made us less free, not more. Despite the fact that 9/11 was endlessly tragic, it fractured something in the American psyche: perhaps due to the fact that there really has never been anything like a real domestic terror campaign in the US, and the US is protected behind the ocean walls? For example I was born in Northern Ireland when my Father served there, and since 1969 the UK has lived with real terror and bombings both in Northern Ireland and on the mainland. I grew up in an army family and got used to closing curtains at night before the lights went on to foil assassination, and checking under cars in the morning on military housing for car bombs, because it was a real threat. But since 9/11, whatever happened to the American psyche, it has resulted in less freedom, not more.

America is certainly no longer a British place. In fact, those of British ancestry appear to be way down on the list. It seems that Germans make up the largest racial group? Is that true, from a quick search on the internet? If so, it certainly explains a lot, perhaps certainly State Trooper uniforms, and the rush to an authoritarian society! The ignorance I see when people tell me that I should be thankful to America that I am not speaking German after WWI and WWII disgusts me. Simply rude and ignorant. What makes it doubly ironic is that American society has become very authoritarian. You don’t have to even go so far as the ‘sir-yes-sir’ robotic ridiculousness of many of the drone-like officers in military service, who would not know a lawful order from an unlawful one, and will simply do what they are told for ‘Merica (whatever they think that is in their mind). Exhibiting terrible leadership and betrayal of their soldiers simply through poor officer selection and training resulting in the hash we have today. Having been through officer selection, training and a career as part of the British Army, which is very selective, I have frankly been amazed at what I have seen here. Oh yes, there are some good ones, but in the minority. Well, it seems to me that America has been very much focusing on being good little Germans.

One thing seems to be true, and that is that many of us feel we are on the “left side” of a moment in history. Such as being in 1860 or 1939. Well, I am about half way through a book called the ‘Fourth Turning.’ This is a historical book that was published in 1997, and explains the Saecula and the patterns of history. No, it is not Nostradamus, but it seems to have accurately charted British and then British-American and then American history in terms of the Saecula (roughly the length of a long life) and the four generations that inhabit and move through each period. We had the ‘hero’ generation, the G.I. generation that fought WWII. In 1997 the historical evidence pointed to somewhere around 2020 for the next crisis. We are right now in the unraveling period. This is a circular progression through history and can be quite well predicted. What cannot be predicted, is what form this crisis will take, and what the result of it will be. But it should be a period of history from which the country will emerge and continue with the Saecula. This does not mean victory, or defeat, but it does mean that it will be a crisis period. Often these have resulted, or revolved around, large wars. Could it be Iran, or something unforeseen as an unintended consequence?

I would certainly recommend this book. For preppers, it gives you something to go on. It situates things nicely beyond the bad feeling we all have in this time of the unraveling.

One thing is certain, and that is we cannot continue the way we are going. Well, we can, if we want less and less Liberty, more and more surveillance, and the emergence of corporate technological governance of our way of life. Something needs to happen. I know many fall into the trap of wanting a ‘reset’ after some sort of ‘boogaloo’, but that in itself is madness. You can plan to ride the tiger, but you have no idea what you will end up with at the other side of that; it could be worse. You can’t really do anything without a popular movement to make things happen, and that will not happen while Americans still believe they are free, and still sit fat and happy in front of the TV with a pizza. We can have a little hope, and the belief that we may reach another ‘turning’ (or crisis) where people reverse their opinions and believe more in Liberty. I know many criticize the younger millennial generations, but I am not so sure. I know I am apparently from the Nomad generation that is supposed to furnish mid-level leaders in the time of crisis, and in fact the millennials are marked down to be the next hero generation. Will it be so?

No, I can’t furnish you with a ‘plan for the boogaloo.’ You cannot go marching in the streets and expect to achieve anything without popular support. If you wish for that black swan event, you don’t know who or what will come out the other side. Possibly however, a crisis and growing popular support for liberty may give us a chance to seize some of it back. The best thing we can do is be proactive in educating our younger generations and those who are coming up as children now – because sadly this may all be on them. Be a part of your community. I know many prepper types are very much about retreating in an insular manner to the family level, with homeschooling and all that, but that may protect your kids but does not help educate the community. In fact it is counter-intuitive because you isolate your family, but the mass outside is only ever exposed to the brainwashing of the left – you and yours become the anomaly. We know for a fact that the left has completed the ‘Long March’ through the Educational establishment and these raging loony lefties are all very much involved in brainwashing children.Those who believe in Liberty need to STAND UP and be a part of educating the youth, through both schools and other programs.