A Fragile World
On June 23, 1914 the Royal Navy sailed into Kiel. British and German naval officers visited each other warships and broke bread together. A few days later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated. As British warships sailed off, the mast of the German warships flew the words “Pleasant Journey”. King Georgie V responded with a wireless message: “Friends Today Friends in the Future Friends Forever”
A few months later, they would be exchanging bullets on the Western Front. What if the Austrians had not sought to exploit the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? What if Serbia accepted the ten demands?
What if Czar Nicholas II had been forceful in rescinding his order for full mobilization? What if Germany had not actuated the Schlieffen Plan? What if Britain signaled to Germany it would enter the war should Germany attack France through Belgium?
What if cooler heads prevailed?
Fifteen million people died in WW1. All because of the ego of a few men.
Think about the series of event that cascaded because of WW1. Lenin was shipped back to Russia by Germany. What followed was mass deaths, gulags and Stalin’s reign of terror. WWII was nothing but a continuation of WWI. The period between the two was a temporary cease fire. The Treaty of Versailles at the close of WW1 decimated Germany. One of Hitler’s early speech was on the Treaty of Versailles. He gave it often. It was popular. Hitler would have died unknown and broke in the slums of Vienna if not for WW1.
Current Events
There are time I wonder if the MSM is evil. Other times, I don’t wonder at all. Trump opened up dialogue with Putin. They held a summit. MSM had a meltdown. Republicans, Democrats and the Intelligence Community attacked Trump. MSM acts as though the Intelligence Community has credibility. Even funnier, they believe they have credibility. What did we learn from the Gulf of Tonkin incident? What about the suppose weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that MSM was so quick to push with no evidence to get the US into a useless war? How about James Clapper lie that the NSA doesn’t spy on US citizens? Why should any one believe anything the Intelligence Community says? Ideas and words matter. The talking heads in MSM should reflect on the events that led to WW1. They need to understand how quickly conflicts can escalate. They are playing a very dangerous game for political purposes. I’m with Rand Paul on this.
The idea of bailing out banks is far older than the 2008 fiasco. During the next crisis, bailouts will come in one form or another. Secretary of the Interior under President Reagan gives an account from 1982 on third world countries not being able to repay their loans. From James Watt’s memoirs:
Secretary Regan was explaining the inability of those destitute countries to pay even interest on the loans that individual banks such as Bank of America, Chase Manhattan and Citibank Manhattan and Citibank had made. The President was being told what actions the United States “must” take to salvage the situation.
After the Regan and Stockman briefing there were several minutes of discussion before I asked, “Does anyone believe that these less developed countries will ever be able to pay back the principle on these loans?” When no one spoke up I asked, ” If the loans are never going to be repaid, why should we again bail out the countries and arrange payment for their interest?”
The answer came from several voices at once, “If we don’t arrange for their interest payments, the loans will go into default, and it could put our American banks in jeopardy.” Would the customers lose their money? No, came the answer, but the stockholders might lose dividends.
In amazement, I leaned back in my large, leather chair, only two seats from the President of the United States. I realized that nothing in the world could keep these high government officials from scrambling to protect and bail out a few very large and sorely troubled American banks.
Every fourth of July Americans celebrate their independence from Great Britain. The American Revolution was supposingly fought over the high tax burden the Parliament of Great Britain imposed on the colonies. There are two problems with this theory.
First, the tax burden imposed on the colonies is estimated to be less than 5%. There was no income tax. There was tariffs, yes, but most goods were bought domestically in colonial America. Today, income taxation alone, between the state and federal government, takes about 40% of your wealth.
Second, the tax burden was being reduced by the Parliament of Great Britain from 1770 onward. The only Townshend duty not repealed was the duty on tea, which was a modest levy of threepence per pound.
The Boston Tea Party
The British East India Company was struggling to compete with the smugglers. So the British Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773 to reduce duties on tea and help the British East India Company. The smugglers did not take kind to the reduction of taxation that would put them out of business.
Wikipedia has an entry on this: “Even with the Townshend duty in effect, the Tea Act would allow the East India Company to sell tea more cheaply than before, undercutting the prices offered by smugglers, but also undercutting colonial tea importers, who paid the tax and received no refund. In 1772, legally imported Bohea, the most common variety of tea, sold for about 3 shillings (3s) per pound. After the Tea Act, colonial consignees would be able to sell it for 2 shillings per pound (2s), just under the smugglers’ price of 2 shillings and 1 penny (2s 1d).” The Boston Tea Party took place because of a reduction of taxes. It was a bunch of pirates destroying private property of a private company. It is no coincidence that the heart of the American Revolution started in Boston, home of the smugglers.
The Constitution The first constitution was the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation had no federal government. None with the power to tax anyway. The thirteen colonies were, by and large, thirteen different governments. The Federalist did not like the idea of the US without a strong central government. James Madison tried endlessly to get a convention in Philadelphia to alter the Articles of Confederation. George Washington was retired and did not want to be bothered. Madison knew he needed George Washington to get a constitutional convention. Then Shays Rebellion occurred.
Dr. North gives a concise view of legend versus reality:
“The 1786/7 rebellion in Massachusetts known as Shays’ Rebellion is generally believed to be the event that moved George Washington off the sidelines regarding Madison’s proposed convention in Philadelphia. He had resisted Madison’s repeated requests that he attend the convention. Washington was told by two trusted informants in Massachusetts that this was a widespread revolt of the lower classes. These rebels were undermining public order in their quest to overturn property rights. Washington believed these reports. He decided that it was time for a change in the fundamental laws of the United States. What I did not know in 1989, and no historian knew, was that the Shays’ Rebellion was an armed resistance movement of about 4,000 property-owning men in western Massachusetts. Contrary to reports from the anti-Shays faction in 1787, and contrary to most textbook accounts ever since, it was not a revolt of impoverished, indebted rural radicals. It included men of all economic classes. Many of them were veterans of the American Revolution, including Daniel Shays, who served from the battle of Bunker (Breed’s) Hill onward, and was a distinguished officer who worked his way up from the ranks to captain. Lafayette awarded him a sword for his valor. These men revolted against a group of speculators who had recently gained control of the governor’s office. For over two centuries, Americans did not know the truth. Then, in one of those fluke events that every historian dreams about, Professor Leonard Richards of the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) stumbled onto a fact that no previous historian had bothered to investigate. After the defeat of the rebels, the state required each of them to sign a loyalty oath. Unlike previous political rebellions, there were archival records of those who had participated. These records were right under Prof. Richards’ nose, yet it took several months for him to learn that they were actually in his own university’s library: on microfilm. He then made a detailed investigation of the participants: the towns they lived in, their family connections, their debt position in 1786, and their political offices, if any. What he learned enabled him to re-write the story of Shays’ Rebellion. It was not a revolt of indebted farmers. It was a tax revolt.”
The stage was set. A constitutional convention was to be held. “Never let a crisis go to waste” is as old as the sun. They agreed to meet and change the Articles of Confederation. Patrick Henry was one of the Virgina Assembly men who was invited to the constitutional convention. He refused to go. He famously said, “I smell a rat.” He knew they were planning to junk the Articles of Confederation. Dr. North correctly called the constitutional convention a conspiracy based on the following: “The Convention was assembled under false pretenses. All attendees took a vow of lifetime silence. They held their meetings on the second floor: no eavesdroppers The press was barred from attending. The legislatures’ instructions were deliberately violated.” I would add that at the constitutional convention, the Federalist outnumbered the Anit-Federalist by a large margin.
Madison kept notes on the debate in Philadelphia. On day one, they scraped the Articles of Confederation and pulled out the Virgina Plan, which would morph into the US Constitution .
The purpose of the US Constitution was to centralize power to the Federal Government. The Federalist Papers, written by Madison, Hamilton and to a lesser extent John Jay, was propaganda to convince the colonies that what they were doing was legal. It was not. It was strictly forbidden by the Articles of Confederation. The US Constitution was poorly written. It gave enormous power to the Federal Government.
Lysander Spooner sums up the US Constitution in his work No Treason: “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”
Conclusion I do not celebrate the fourth of July. Neither should you. The colonies had a saying “No taxation without representation”. Now we have representation with absurd taxation levels.
I will give up my vote any day to go back to the taxation under the British Parliament in 1775. My view on the American Revolution can be summed up in one scene.
Solzhenitsyn was not a fan of Roosevelt and Churchill. From The Gulag Archipelago:
“In their own country, Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiment’s of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious… what was the military or political sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin’s hands hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens determined not to surrender.”
On Churchill handing over of the Cossacks:
“He [Churchill] turned over the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men. Along with them he also handed over many wagon loads of old people, women, and children…This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths.”
Victors write the history books. Read this for another view.
The book, “Ordinary Men”, is a story about the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. Thousands of Jewish men, women, children and infants were murdered. The book is dark and depressing.
At Józefów, Major Trapp made an offer for men to step forward who wanted to excuse themselves from the atrocities they were about to commit. Out of five hundred men only twelve stepped forward. Why only twelve? Later reflections indicate there was no time to think. It was all too sudden. Additionally, no one wanted to abandon their comrades.
The rationalization given by a thirty-five-year old metal worker is astonishing:
“I made the effort, and it was possible for me, to shoot only children. It so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live without their mothers.”
The author points out that the German word for “release” also means to “redeem” or “save” when used in a religious sense.
The people who committed the mass murder at Józefów were not sadist. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were metalworkers, barbers, salesmen, etc. The book details the physical and mental anguish these men suffered for the rest of their lives. It also gives insight into the psychology of man.
It is wrong to say every citizen in Nazi Germany was pure evil. We all like to think we would have been Oskar Schindler. We would have hid Anne Frank and put our entire family at risk. Statistically, you would have not been those people.
Below are the number of deaths due to school shootings since the 1800’s.
Number of school shooting incidents in the USA:
We see the amount of elementary and secondary school enrollment is about the same.
In other words, the added number of school shootings and deaths is not due to the increase in the amount of children.
It is interesting to see the jump in the 1990’s.
We live in a complex world. Trying to explain the increase is not going to be a simple answer. Culture definitely plays an important part in explaining it.
What I do know is this: A bunch of people in D.C. writing words on a piece of paper is not going to solve this issue or any other issue.
The public’s faith and belief in government legitimacy is astounding. If words on a piece of paper could make the world a better place we would all be living in a utopia right now.
Government’s are not going to protect your children. The public school system will not protect your children from school shootings to bullying. Parents still have full faith in the school system though. They send their children to the intellectual meat grinder to get an inferior education.
At the conclusion of the first joint debate at Ottawa, August 21, 1858 between Lincoln and Douglas, the Tribune, which was a pro Lincoln paper, reported: At the conclusion of the debate, when Mr. Lincoln walked down from the platform, he was seized by the multitude and borne off on their shoulders, in the center of a crowd of five thousand shouting Republicans, with a band of music in front. The Chicago delegation scattered for the cars, and so ended the great debate. The Times, which was a pro Douglas paper, reported the opposite: When Douglas had concluded the shouts were tremendous; his excoriation of Lincoln was so severe, that the republicans hung their heads in shame. The democrats, however, were loud in their vociferation.
