The Tripoli Expedition of 1805 (a different POV)

 Presley O'Bannon, a legend in the Corps and in his own mind, took Derne, Tripoli on 27 April

1805 with 7 Marines (one Sgt and six Privates, oh and a Navy Midshipman with the

improbable name of "Mann"). 

Rather than engage in some stale retelling of this story in a classical and fucking boring

historical account, I'm gonna take a LOT of poetic license and tell this story from the 1st

person POV of the poor fucking Sergeant who had to run this particular railroad.

We'll shorten the prologue to this, because this was the first instance of the State Dept

kicking something into the stands that resulted in good men getting killed. Huzzah.

So, there I was [he said], in my birthing space on the ARGUS, minding my own damn

bidness, and fucking with Chief Surly, who had the rack below me, by farting in time with the

pitch of the ship (we'd had cabbage at chow for like ten days straight, the stench was

unbelievable.)

Pvt Hunt beats on the hatch screaming for permission to...

"Yeah, shut yer yawp and open the goddamn hatch".

"Aye, Sgt." [Opens hatch] "Lt. wants you up in his wardroom."

Fuck me. What now?

"He didn't say, Sgt."

No shit, fuckstick. It was rhetorical. Disappear, shithead.

"Aye"

I found the sir up on the weather deck, actually. Talking to some civilian asshole. Called

himself "Eaton. Esquire, actually."

No shit. Just like that. Fucking asshole.

So get this. They lay it all out for me in like ten minutes. They want to land at Alexandria, go

find the wog that used to run Tripoli but was deposed, and walk from Egypt to fucking

Tripoli with a handful of Christian Greeks and a shitload of Bedouin assholes.

Like what could possibly go wrong?

Right?

Well, EVERYTHING WENT FUCKING WRONG.

We walked 40 miles a fucking day, across the fucking Sahara Desert. From mid-February to

late March. I had Mohammedans and the Greeks at each other's throats everyday, while

every Bedouin tries to steal our shit so they can sell it back to us. FUBAR.

At several points, the idiot who was our guide swore up and down that the next stop would

have a well and we could fill up on water.

Fucking wrong. Oh, there was a well--but the motherfucker was drier than the Queen's

snatch. So we walked another 40 miles, another dry well.

Ever mediate a fight between Greeks, Turks, and Bedouins? I have. It's fucking bullshit.

Yeah, because fuck you. Four different languages, two different religions. Get off my dick.

So, me and my Privates--all SIX of them,FFS--stare down these cocksuckers with fixed

bayonets. I shit you not, the only thing that saved the day was that Eaton, esq. idiot coming

up with the idea to eat one of the camels.

Know what camel tastes like? It tastes like a chicken's sweaty asshole. So I've got angry

people from three different countries, who don't speak English, bitching at each other

because of God, who haven't had a drop of water in 3 goddamn days...

...and Eaton esq.'s fucking solution is to eat the transportation. Well, fuckhead, what's gonna

carry the ammo that was on the camel? Hmmmm?

You guessed it. We spread loaded that shit amongst us. Because O'Bannon didn't want to

piss off the wogs. Jesus wept.

Oh, and guess what? We find this Navy Midshipman cocksucker who was along who had this

weird trail of orange peels behind him. No shit, I'm eating sweat-basted chicken asshole and

this fucker's horded a shitload of oranges. True fact. O'Bannon pulled me off of him. Twat.

Well, on 10 April, we got word that the ships were sighted off of Bomba, so we shagged ass

that direction and finally got resupplied. Thank Christ. Pvt. Hunt was falling out constantly,

and if we didn't get help, I was going to beat that fucker to death.

Well, bad news. We get to Bomba on the 16th and no fucking ships. Seriously.

I took it out on Hunt, that bleeding asshole, so I felt somewhat mollified.

I asked the Sir if this Swiss Watch was living up to his fucking expectations. He just sniffed

and walked off. Asshole.

More mutinous shit from the fucking wogs from every corner. We stared 'em down again

with fixed bayonets.

Finally, on 17 April, Hunt comes off OP screaming like a teenage girl because he spotted sails

on the horizon. Kid has no idea how close to death by my hands he was then.

So, we met support on the beach, endured the smugness of that Eaton esq. asshole, and got

the first real meal we'd had in a month. To this day, if my old lady serves either rice or

biscuits, I lose my shit.

O'Bannon and that Eaton fuckwad come up with a plan to close on Derna. Basically, it

involved the Greeks/Bedouins up over our left shoulder lighting up the entry point, while

Hunt and I breached. (It had to be Hunt. Fucker was cross-eyed. You think I want him on

support?)

Okay, healthcare is free.

So we do this, and magically, we didn't get shot by either the Arabs or the Greeks.

Right as we breach, fucking O'Bannon busts past me on a medal of honor run. Damnedest

thing I've seen. God must love THAT motherfucker.

He shot a load of nickels into the position inside the gate, pulled both pistols and let fly with

that shit to the confused dude running down the stairs, and we're in. The barbarian horde

came in behind us, and by the time I could reload, we were in there like swimwear.

The arty guys came up behind us and started moving field pieces around toward the town.

Yeah, we liberated that fucker alright, by bombing the shit out of it with their own artillery.

Next thing I know, swear to God, O'Bannon had a US flag in his kit, of all things. He's up at

the mast on the top deck, takes down whatever rag was up there and raises the national

ensign, by God. I choke up just saying that. Goddamn beautiful, by God.

Huzzah and all that shit. Found water, pulled the camels up for ammo, buried Wilton (poor

bastard), and bandaged up that Eaton esq idiot.

New problem set, lieutenant. We took this bitch, how in the blue fuck are we gonna hold it

against every wild-eyed Mohammedan in the Sahara?

So we posted up on defense, tied in everybody, and waited. The Easton esq cocksucker

turned out to be useful in the end, since he bullshitted the chief Mohammedan of this

shithole into surrendering before we marched on Tripoli.

More good news, the young ladies of Derna are fucking hot and very willing. We left in June,

after hauling more ass than the B&O railroad. They wrote a song about us. No shit. "Din din

Mohamed U Ryas Melekan manhandi,"...

...which means "Mohamed for religion and the Americans for stubbornness." I think you can

read between the fucking lines.

So that's my '04-'06 deployment. Swear to God.

Bartender, another one for me and whatever this dude wants. My tab.

Sources:

https://www.usmcu.edu/Research/Marine-Corps-History-Division/People/Whos-Who-in-

Battle of

Faith and Truth, Part III

 

So, despite my procrastination, I'm going to get in here and do this, because it is the most important part of Exodus that has the biggest parallels with our own time. It's part 3 of the Exodus , here for you. God taking the slack out of his people.

Moses was touched by God, had to face down his own doubts about God and about himself. That was part 1 and can be found here: https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2023/10/faith-and-truth.html

Following this pattern, Moses had to provide "proof" of his God to Pharaoh, establishing the pattern of worldly governments establishing themselves as "gods" in their own right. You know how that ended.

So, now Moses has been told that he can extract his people from Egypt, and he goes about doing so with a surety that is remarkable, given the challenges. Those challenges are kind of glossed over, so let's dedicate a bit of thought to the lash-up that Moses drug around for 40 yrs.

One morning in the Spring of 1446 BC, after strife that I've not really touched on, Moses woke up from a nap and led 2.5 Million Jews out of Egypt. 600,000 men. And you KNOW that they didn't pack lightly. They brought the fucking kitchen sink with 'em. And let's talk about the character of those people. What do you think they were like?

They had been enslaved for generations. Kept, fed, tended, abused, but dependent in every way on their Egyptian masters. Upon Pharaoh. For their very existence. They knew in their hearts that there was a way of living that was free. God had promised them this in the stories of Abraham and his progeny. They seemed "up" for this challenge, and so Moses led them out.

I mean think about it for a minute. A lot of you have stood in front of, or led formations, but 2.5 million? With all their shit, their kids, and their animals? How daunting was that? My brothers and sisters, Moses was a fucking stud. [Hand and arm signal for "forward"]

As I mentioned earlier, Moses knew he had to hurry because the Man was bound to change his mind and come to destroy his people. And they did. A moment here that gets glossed over in the modern era: In 1446 BC, Egyptian chariots were the modern equivalent of M1A2 Abrams fucking tanks. What's more, Moses KNEW and had employed chariots in his past. All of that risk was known. Think about all of those factors for a couple of minutes.

Right? 600K men. Better part of 1.9 million women, children, and God knows how many dogs, cats, and livestock of every imaginable stripe. But we're free and we're moving and that's a good day, by God.

Oh, except we've got to somehow get all of those people over the Red Sea.

You wanna talk about a "pillar of faith"? Here's Moses, who knows where he's gotta go, and what's pursuing him, and what that force is capable of in terms of destruction, and there's the Red fucking Sea. Bigger than life.

Meanwhile, behind him, he's hearing "Oh shit, we're fucked! We should never have left Pharaoh. This was all a mistake!" And here is the crux of all of this. The sheer will of Moses to hold his leaders to the cause, despite every reason to just give it up. the effectiveness of those leaders to hold the resolve of the people to just keep fucking moving forward.

So, they get to the Red Sea and God fulfills his promise and brings them across (Moses' S-4 had to be dancing a fucking jig, by the way) THEN after every Israelite crossed with dry feet, and the armored phalanx began across the gap, God destroyed the Egyptian phalanx.

2.5 million people. With all their shit. Those of you who've moved people, sit for a minute and contemplate the scale of this miracle. Saved. Moses' faith and will has to be noted here. That's Cooperstown shit, right there. GOAT. I'm gonna skip over a lot of what comes next, but I have a reason for doing so.

What did Moses have to do next? He had to make his people feral again. Abraham was feral. Esau, Joseph, and Jacob were feral. The Israelites that Moses led into the desert were not. They were analogous to domesticated turkeys. It took God one single day to get the Jews out of Egypt. It took God 40 fucking YEARS to get Egypt out of his people.

Right there. That's the Lesson of Exodus. We sit up here, fat and happy, with our "Soft men create hard times" memes. Moses spent 40 years trying to fix that. Because God the Father could not simply allow this weak tribe to go out and be dominated by the feral people in Canaan. He had to harden them, he had to make them effective, so he spent a generation or two making them free.

As

@wayofftheres

and

@DolioJ

and

@Brushbeater

and

@EMBurlingame

and

@braxton_mccoy

et al. have tried to emphasize over the past couple of years, we have a duty to be Moses, essentially. Yet, we can't expect any of the advantages of having God part the Seas for us. Rather, we must rely on our own cunning and resilience to carry us and our families through what is to come. Exodus is a cautionary tale. You should read it. You should think about Moses, and how you measure up.

You don't need "proof", you don't need Him to come down and crush your enemies. The proof is in your heart, it's been there for millions of years. You need only have faith in that tiny voice that begs you to do the next right thing.

Faith and Truth, Part II

 

Tonight, we're going to talk about Exodus again. Because it's instructive, and we might ought to pay attention to what has been laid before us as a lesson for thousands of years. "Faith, truth, and proof"

A quick lead in that is not related to Exodus, but which is common to the human condition and is remarkable throughout this entire argument. Milton, in "Paradise Lost" pointed out something remarkable that you should include in your perceptions: The basis of the sin of Lucifer before the Fall was his assumption that he knew EVERYTHING that was worth knowing. Look upon your politicians and your leaders and judge them according to that.

Assess your own ego and put it against that. But let's get back to Exodus in light of that.

So, when we left Moses night before last, we saw that he begrudgingly accepted his own worth as God's chosen representative, to plea before Pharaoh for the freedom of his people. Daunting, no?

We see that Moses required proof of His ability to pull it off. We talked about my own interpretation of why he did that it part 1 of this. Find it here: https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2023/10/faith-and-truth.html

But it's remarkable how the entire book of Exodus is dedicated to the central question that was laid before God by everyone: "I require proof of your effectiveness before I will believe that you are the one, true God." Moses did it. Pharaoh did it. The people of Israel did it. Let's talk about Pharaoh tonight, shall we?

So Moses came on and did the Thing. He came to Egypt to free the people of his father, at the behest of the Almighty. Accepting of his function in this, confident in his faith. He was known to Pharaoh, and thus he got an audience with him. His argument was essentially this: "My people are slaves, and my God has sent me here to free them. I require that you do so, immediately."

To which Pharaoh replied, "I am Pharaoh."

Think on it for a sec. "I am the monarch. I am the state. I am God." Sounds familiar, doesn't it? "You need no other authority than ME." "You need look to any other to protect you than ME." "Any who say different are acting in a manner that is unreliable and endangers us all"

"If it is as you say," said Pharaoh, "prove to me that your God is the true God."

And so it went. Proof demanded in order to accept God and release His people. Proof demanded, despite the truth shown to Pharaoh. Over, and over, and over, and over. Until God's wrath was demonstrated to him in such a manner as to take his own child and the children of Egypt.

What can we derive from that? I think Milton's conclusion regarding Lucifer is the most impactful, and is the most repetitive throughout history. "I know EVERYTHING that is worthy as knowing."

That perfectly describes the downfall of the Morningstar, and of every single stupid motherfucking idea we've ever heard of. If one is careful in his study, one can note that pride as being the foremost cause of every single tyranny in the history of the fucking world.

The demand for "Proof" of God. The denial of the existence, purpose, and plan of God. Rather than faith in what is plainly the most powerful thing imaginable. What can one do in the face of that?

Challenge oneself, as Moses did, to fulfill one's potential. Walk before God with humility and paying attention to opportunities that appear within that mindset. Then, move forward aggressively to take advantage of that opportunity. Pharaoh's and Lucifer's failure cannot be our own. We DON'T know EVERYTHING that is worth knowing. It is upon us to remain humble in our perception of the world. That is our choice, and it is what separates us from Pharaoh. It is what makes us free.

Freedom, indeed, is predicated on the humility to admit that one is wrong, that one has much to learn, that He is not finished with us until we die. It is predicated on the discipline to listen, to assume that we'll never know ALL the answers, and to remain open to His will. Pharaoh could not see this. His pride was too consuming. His people paid for that.

Moses had seen this, walked appropriately in his faith, and led his people out of Egypt. Out of tyranny. With no assurances. "Go and do the Thing," he was told.

He did the Thing, with faith in himself and faith in his God. In front of a people who had been slaves, domesticated for generations. And THAT is the third level to this lesson, and we'll deal with that tomorrow.

Faith and Truth

There is so much truth that we can take from Exodus, if we can just put down our modern sensibilities and consult that ancient wisdom that lies deep within each of us. Among the most important lessons that we can derive is the repeated bludgeoning of the ineffective tactic of trying to provide "proof" of God to those who are neither willing nor prepared to receive God. It's a great fucking story, that runs a few different levels.

First level: Moses himself. Moses by virtue of this faith, has been chosen by God to free His chosen people. He is God's Instrument in this particular situation. (henceforth "Moses" will be referred to as "Mo", in deference to my mortarmen. IFYKYK) Lotta back and forth in this. Mo doesn't think he's worthy. Mo doesn't want the responsibility. Mo has doubts. One can understand. It's a heavy, heavy burden, and one that takes a special kind of madness to take up and do the Thing appropriately.

@wayofftheres

talks about this.

Mo eventually agrees and goes about doing the Thing. How to convince folks of his cause? Won't they just think I'm fucking crackers? This is the first level: even though Mo has PROOF, Mo lacks FAITH in himself. He had to get past that before he began his work. God nudged him.

So God said, "What's that in your hand?" Mo: "A staff" God: "Heh. Check it out."

So it's fucking PROOF, right? But Mo needed the FAITH in himself (and by extension, what God was telling him). So God went through several examples of proof. Finally, armed with this, Mo felt confident enough to go and do the Thing.

The hour is late and the flesh is weak, so I'll wind up the first level with a few observations. 1) Perception & knowledge differ by virtue of our willingness to accept the reality of what we perceive. Failure to do so results in us lying to ourselves.

2) Demanding proof in order to have faith is a fool's game. You know truth in your heart the moment that you perceive it. Refusal to act in a manner that is required by virtue of that truth is a moral failure.

3) Demanding MOAR proof is just stubbornness and rationalizing of what is right in front of you. You know what you should be doing in your heart. Some of it will require you to change. Some of it will require sacrifice of things you like.

Change is ubiquitous, whether you like it or not. Sacrifice is your duty as an adult human being, no matter how much you'd like to take it easy. Have faith in your ability to become what you're meant to be. Get after it, fella. 2nd Level tomorrow night.

Standing Out

 Not too long ago, various biologists were studying zebras out in the wild.  The problem they kept confronting in their observation of individual zebras was discerning a given subject as it milled about with the herd.  Someone came up with the idea to mark his subject with a simple blot of paint so that he could keep track of the subject.

To their horror, the lions cut that individual from the herd and ate it almost immediately.  Thus, it was surmised, the safety of the individual within a zebra herd was in blending in with the rest of the zebras.  Those who stand distinct will be identified as individuals and consumed.

When I first heard of this study, it struck me in a very significant way.  Most who know me will attest to the fact that I've walked the earth these many years with a large paint blot on me for any apex predator to see.  When I was a young lieutenant, I tried like mad to wash it off.  By the time I was twenty-seven, I realized that it was a pointless exercise and that I must find a way to make due, malformed though I might be.

It's a weird dichotomy for me, and it's something that I've chased around in my head for decades.  Mistrusting groups of people while being a Marine.  Working for a government that I mistrust.  An old friend wrote to me the other day that, "Your paranoia of anything new and the world writ large is scary to me. Not because of the things that cause it; because of what your nightmares must look like."  (I responded with, "My nightmare is Solzhenitsyn's description of what happened to his country.")

If nothing else, these suspicions have allowed me to think critically in ways that are probably far from standard and I think it has been useful in those instances where I can avoid cynicism at all costs.  What follows, therefore, is a realistic view of the healthy interaction between an individual and the group, the mob, the masses, "culture"; how "duty" and "patriotism" jibe with "individual sovereignty" and "free will"; and finally, how the difficult path which is separate from that of the herd justifies our suffering and allows us to transcend it. 

Standing Out

Any explanation that seeks to explain the way things are now without looking from whence we came leaves out the conditions under which this entire reality is operating.  Hobbes, Locke, Nozick, et al recognized this, but most obviate the requirement to consider this stage of history in the context of a "state of nature".  I will spare the 10,000 words that the worthies referenced above used to explain how we derive "natural rights" because that isn't germane to my argument. 

Sometime between 550,000 and 750,000 years ago, homo sapiens became distinct from our nearest ancestors.  What's never really talked about is how a species of "featherless bipeds" with very unimpressive physical defenses survived and reproduced with enough success to take over the world.  The obvious answer is that we grouped together into tribes and adopted habits and techniques unique to the most successful of those nascent groups.  Perhaps the largest factor that reinforced this was the fact that, unlike female apes, human females were very selective in whom they mated with.  Also, while this is supposition, I think the beta-version of the human race had a heightened ability to communicate or at least empathize at least a subconscious level that gave them an advantage over other predators.  Thus, humans strived, suffered, overcame, and thrived in groups that conformed to very strict patterns of behavior.  An individual who would deviate from those patterns was either quickly killed off or similarly excluded from the group and died alone because his deviation could result in the decimation of the entire tribe. Kierkegaard brushed up against this when he said:

"Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household.  A person keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there." 

The stakes were high indeed in those days.  But over time, men who had new ideas did emerge to the benefit of their tribe.  Think on it for a second, those geniuses had a tightrope to walk, didn't they?  They had to learn the various behavior patterns that had benefitted their tribe for generations.  They had to prove their worth in executing those patterns competently.  They had to conceive of a "better way" and then have both the competence and reputation to articulate their "new ideas" to the rest of the tribe sufficiently to convince their mates to diverge from the "old ways" of doing things. Only then would their new ideas be tested at quite a risk to their tribe, people whom they loved and were devoted to.  Any failure potentially meant the abrupt end of everything and everyone they knew.  I think this adequately describes the reason why such geniuses are seen to be a bit crazy and are easily and casually disregarded even now.  More so, this completely describes the anxiety that Kierkegaard described above. 

Now, rather than trace all of the advances made by men such as these, let's just think for a moment about what all this means.  What began as collections of very small tribes of people have resulted in 8+ billion people across the globe.  There was error and there was blood but we somehow managed to get to the year 2022.  I would submit that all of this was made possible by the continued selection across time of those who were not simply complacent to go along with the tribe.  Thinking critically within a given pattern of behavior is in our DNA.  The circumstances are not anywhere close to being as dire as they were in the beginning, but the propensity to expand outside of established norms is deep within our genes and within our psyche.  Each of us is the sum of the men and women who were willing to risk everything to find a better answer to the problems encountered through all of the suffering and striving for hundreds of thousands of years.  Placed in this light, it is clear that we have a duty to our ancestors and our families today to fulfill all of the requirements that they surmounted to advance us to this point.  

It is in this that we can answer the dichotomy posed above between being a member of the herd while yet standing out from the herd.  There remains risk involved and it is not easy.  For most, the call to conform and "stay in one's lane" is the obvious and least strenuous choice.  As Fredrich Nietzsche once said:

“A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth’s continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: “They have a propensity for laziness.” To others, it seems that he should have said: “They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions.” In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience – why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful.”

So the pay off for not risking the disapproval of society, for accepting conventional wisdom without taking the time and effort to analyze it, is safety.  The lions can't see you against the backdrop of the rest of the herd.  

What would then justify standing out from the crowd?  What is it that dwells within each of us to step out of line?  Why face Kierkegaard's "anxiety" if we don't have to?

Well, you're going to suffer either way.  You will feel pain whether you walk their line or not.  Reality is structured in that manner and there's no arguing or bargaining your way around it.  

But you do have a choice as to how you will face that pain, that suffering.  The legacy of our anscestors is choice in what we believe and how we embody that belief in how we act.  It is thus our responsibility to make use of that legacy to learn about the world around us, to understand what our limitations are, to dare to step beyond those limitations when it is appropriate and necessary for us to do so.  Philosophers for time out of mind have done so and attached adjectives like "meaningful", "satisfaction", "proper", or "complete" to describe life as a result of having done so. 

I find those descriptions to be somehow incomplete.  Nietzsche up there threw out "laziness" and "fearful" in describing those who refused to accept the burden of originality.  I tend to agree, and I've come to the conclusion that such negative connotations reflect an unwillingness to look within oneself and realize the potential that is inside of us.  The realization of that potential by constant learning, improvement, and reflection that is then embodied in our interaction with the world is what we owe to that legacy that was freely given to us by dint of simply existing in our current form. 

We learn with the tribe as we grow older.  We understand its ways, what keeps it thriving and why. Then it becomes our lot to look within us, to see the potential there, to make up our own minds, and to choose to step out and lead it.  The failure and the repetition is necessary for us to realize the full value of what is inside us.  That potential doesn't belong simply to us though.  It is on loan from our ancestors.  It is the birthright of our children and their children. It belongs to the tribe. 

Stand out.

The Best I Got Left

 

The Best I Got Left. 

1 March 2022

Unclean

It was 2002.  I was a 32 yr old Captain. The President wanted to go to war.  I wanted to go to war.  The media went on a tear like we're seeing right now.  "You're with us or with THEM!" We said.  We said it constantly, we heard it without end, and we never questioned the authorities on whose behalf we were to fight.

We were wrong.  Not because we fought, but because we forgot to question the answers that were given to us.  Many of us have looked back and were not surprised at the lies, now plainly exposed, that were fed to us.  We knew in our hearts that the justification was a little sketchy.  It didn't matter, back then.  We wanted to fight.

We were wrong.  I was wrong.

My mistakes make up the majority of the fund of knowledge that I offer to those who are young.  In the case of mass corporate media driving madness toward war, don't listen to them.  That was our failure.  That was my failure.  Good men died because of me.

We failed in the first act, that of independent thought.  Largely because of that lack, our efforts were doomed from that very point forward.  Lies are nothing but attempts to misshape the world around us into something other than reality.  Reality inevitably snaps back and shows us to be fools.  Anything built upon that lie falls without foundation.

Well, twenty years have passed and the exact same people who drummed up the war then are at it again now.  They are, again, trying to misshape the world into something other than reality.  Anything that is based upon that will fall just as utterly.  Good men will die as a result.

Don't lie to yourself, and don't let somebody convince you of following them when they are busy misshaping the world.  Ask the questions.  Question the answers.  Keep questioning until your heart is satisfied.  Anything less than that is failure.

I'm rather past the halfway point of the four-score that I hope to be allotted.  I pray that the Lord will allow me to atone by destroying an enemy worthy of a good death, but I'm old enough to know that He rarely goes in for that sort of plain symmetry, nor do I fear that I am worthy of such an opportunity at redemption.  

What is left, then, is to teach.  To observe and instruct about reality as it is, not as I wish it were.  That is truth.  It's about the best that I have left.  

Don't let my mistake, all those years ago, be forgotten.

Learn from it.  

    

Legislation vs. Morality

 

My mother had a few bromides that have stuck with me over the years.  "Don't poop where you sleep" was a good one.  "Keep your pecker out of the payroll" is one that has kept me out of trouble for the better part of 35 years.

But she used to repeat, watching the news of the day, that "You can't legislate morality."  I've been working that out since I was 18, and on it's face, it's completely bullshit, since Moses' Ten Commandments and the Hammurabi code are both results of the steady and continual watching of goal-oriented behavior long enough to extract and embody those things which were most important to a burgeoning society.

Thus is morality, and thus is it embodied in law.

But I get what Ma was trying to express.  We've watched it get worse and worse over the past 35 years. What she meant, and what we've seen, are laws that contradict morality.  

Morality is simply the rank ordering of patterns of behavior that are most important to us.  Think about it.  What is the best thing you could be?  

Maybe that thing would be someone who voluntarily accepted to be denied by his friends, betrayed by his church, and tortured to death by his state, in order to wash the burden of sin from mankind.  Something like that, I reckon.  I can't conceive of anything more heroic.  Hit me up in the comments if you can perceive anything more awesome than that.

So, that's the highest, as nearly as I can determine.  

Here recently, anyone who would try to act in such a manner would be branded as a "white supremacist" (regardless of race.  See: Larry Elder.)  He would be branded as a "domestic terror risk".  

I think what Ma meant when she said "you can't legislate morality" was that it is very important for us not to confuse God with the government.  

God loves you.

Your government looks upon you as chattel.

God expects you to sacrifice appropriately to become a better person and strive to transcend the suffering that is endemic to living on this mortal coil.  

Your government expects you to consume as you are instructed, be smart enough to pull levers and push buttons upon command and no smarter.  To readily and cheerfully act in a manner that benefits them personally.  

We can see a diversion between the two ideals.  The government is not your God.  It is comprised of barely competent office holders who have no consideration for your lot in life and are actively hostile toward you if your interests conflict with theirs.  We'll never fix that.  It's baked in.  We have to realize this fact and simply go on our way...

Our way to becoming worthy of Christ's sacrifice, on a path to transcend the pain of existence through forthright thought and action.  

When choosing who may represent us, I recommend looking for those who might defend us from those wearying bureaucrats described above.  We should demand that those who represent us have the chief quality of wanting us to be free of restriction, able to achieve our goals, and unfettered in our natural rights.  

In that manner, we may realize a government that once again is more concerned with the freedom of its citizens, while disregarding the temptation to force us into a chosen manner of behavior. 

That is the way.  To demand more of ourselves and expect more of those who wish to speak on our behalf.   

Unclean

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part V

 

More selected passages from Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West.  This one is the last, best, and longest.  Taken from his talk on BBC radio on 24 March 1976.  This one truly brings home what came before us and the daunting task in front of us.  Please read this and share it as widely as you are able.

…The years went by.  The decades went by.  In spite of the Iron Curtain, views on what was happening in the West, what people were thinking about, kept coming through to us [in the USSR’s Gulags], mainly thanks to the BBC’s Russian broadcasts, although they were vigorously jammed.  And the more we learned, the more the state of your world perplexed us.

Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, over simplified explanations.  One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lost the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?  Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception? [Emphasis added]

This is precisely what we have found to be the correlation between the spiritual development of the East and that of the West.  And, alas, the process of your development is five, if not ten times swifter than ours.  This is what almost robs mankind of any hope of avoiding a global catastrophe.  For years we refused to believe this, thinking that the information which reached us was inadequate.  A few years ago I spoke of this with considerable alarm, in my Nobel lecture.

And yet, until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined the extreme degree to which the West actually desired to blind itself to the world situation, the extreme degree to which the West had already become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it, a world oppressed above all by the need to defend its freedom.

There is a German proverb which runs “Mut verloren—alles verloren”: “When courage is lost, all is lost”.  There is another Latin one, according to which the loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction.  But what happens to a society in which both these losses—the loss of courage and the loss of reason—intersect?  This is the picture which I found the West presents today.

Of course there is a perfectly simple explanation for this process.  It is not the superficial one, so fashionable in our day, that man himself is irreproachable and everything is to be blamed on a badly organized society, but a purely human one.  Once, it was proclaimed and accepted that above man there was no supreme being, but instead that man was the crowning glory of the universe and the measure of all things, and that man’s needs, desires, and indeed his weaknesses were taken to be the supreme imperatives of the universe.  Consequently, the only good in the world—the only thing that needed to be done—was that which satisfied our feelings.  It was several centuries ago in Europe that this philosophy was born; at the time, its materialistic excesses were explained away by the previous excesses of Catholicism.  But in the course of several centuries this philosophy inexorably flooded the entire Western world, and gave it confidence for its colonial conquests, for the seizure of African and Asian slaves.   And all this side by side with the outward manifestations of Christianity and the flowering of personal freedom.  By the beginning of the twentieth century this philosophy seemed to have reached the height of civilization and reason.  And your country, Britain, which had always been the core, the very the pearl, of the Western world, gave expression with particular brilliance of this philosophy in both its good and its bad aspects.

In 1914, at the beginning of our ill-fated twentieth century, a storm broke over this civilization, a storm the size and range of which no one at that time could grasp.  For four years Europe destroyed herself as never before, and in 1917 a crevasse opened up on the very edge of Europe, a yawning gap enticing the world into an abyss.

The causes for this crevasse are not hard to find: it was the logical result of doctrines that been bandied about in Europe of ages and had enjoyed considerable success.  But this crevasse has something cosmic about it, too, in its unplumbed, unsuspected depths, in its unimaginable capacity for growing wider and wider and swallowing up more and more people.

Forty years earlier Dostoevsky had predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million victims.  At the time it seemed an improbable figure.  Let me ask the British press to acquaint its readers with the impartial three-page report of the Russian statistician Professor Ivan Kurganov.  It was published in the West twelve years ago, but, as is so often the case with matters of social significance, we only notice things that are not contradictory to our own feelings.  From Professor Kurganov’s analysis, we learn that if Dostoevsky erred, he erred on the side of understatement.  From 1917 to 1959 socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives!   

When there is a geological upheaval, continents do not topple into the sea immediately.  The first thing that happens is that the fatal initial crevasse must appear someplace.  For a variety of reasons it so happened that this crevasse first opened up in Russia, but it might just as well have been anywhere else.  And Russia, which people considered a backward country, had to leap forward a whole century to overtake all the other countries in the world.  We endured inhuman experiences which the Western world—and this includes Britain—has no real conception of and is frightened even to think about.

It is with a strange feeling that those of us who come from the Soviet Union look upon the West today.  It is as though we were neither neighbors on the same planet nor contemporaries.  And  yet we contemplate the West from what will be your future, or we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating itself today.  And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval.  What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us.  But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be. [Emphasis Added]

Please go back and read that last paragraph aloud to yourself.  Solzhenitsyn said those words to us 45 years ago.

Pray.  Think, people.  Speak the truth.  Your freedom is your gift and your burden.  To earn it, you must carry it and hold it with the utmost care.