Good Treasons

George Washington's statute was destroyed in Portland last night, a logical development of the current effort to purge America of America.  Allahpundit writes:
Some of the skepticism about removing Confederate tributes is due to southern cultural pride but I suspect most of it outside the south springs from the understandable fear that lefties who come after Robert E. Lee today will come after George Washington tomorrow. A statue of Thomas Jefferson was toppled just a few days ago in Oregon, in fact. If the left insists on bundling the Founding Fathers together with the Confederate leadership and making racism, including slaveholding, the disqualifying factor in honoring influential Americans of the past then the public will feel it has no choice but to protect that entire bundle. We’re not giving up Washington and Jefferson, period. But if treason against the United States is the disqualifying factor then the Confederates can be unbundled and discarded.
If these people can’t or won’t distinguish between a monument to someone *despite* their view of slavery and a monument to someone *because of* their view of slavery then the righteous cause of purging the country of tributes to degenerate traitors will derail.
The problem he isn't grappling with is that Washington and Lee weren't just alike in having slaves; or in fighting for a system that preserved slavery; or in being Virginians; or in being generals of armies. They're also alike in being secessionists, i.e., traitors from the perspective of the governments they fought against.
This nation came out of a long tradition of beneficial treason, good treason, treason in the name of the best of the human condition. It was born of the tradition that fought King John at Runnymede and compelled from him the Great Charter of Liberties, Manga Carta Libertatum. It is out of the tradition that produced the Declaration of Arbroath in Scotland, in defiance of yet another tyrannical English king, which stated that "It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself." The Scottish national motto was Nemo Me Impune Lacessit, which means, "No One Touches Me With Impunity," or if you like, "No One Messes With Me Without Getting Hurt." That sentiment was also given in Scotland, as later in Alabama, in the words of John 20:17: Noli Me Tangere, usually translated "Touch Me Not," but also:



The values of this new nation are rooted in the principle of rebellion against authority. They are the values of a people who do what they think is right, and will hand you your heads if you try to force them to kneel to your judgment instead of their own. The Founders considered the philosophy of the Greeks. They considered the history of the Romans. They took stock of their reflections on the righteous judgment of God. Then they pledged their fortunes and their lives, and their sacred honor, and did what they had decided was right without fear.
Rooting out treason won't save America, because America as a project began in treason. What is important is to distinguish the good treasons from the bad ones. The good ones are the ones that advance the cause of natural right and human liberty; the bad ones are the ones that seek to violate natural rights, as the Marxists do but as the Confederates also did, or human liberty, as the Marxists think they don't but really do, and as the Confederates certainly did.

Washington and Jefferson were on the right side, almost. Lee's side was wrong. Yet that still isn't the right view of Lee, and it could be that the right view can't be had at this hour. Lee fought for Virginia to keep it from being destroyed. Sheridan's burning of the Shenandoah Valley is a practical example of what Lee feared, which fears caused Lee to take up arms to protect his home. Perhaps Lee was wrong there too; if he had taken command of the Union forces, as offered, he might have been better able to protect Virginia from men like Sheridan and Sherman. He was, as he has often been charged, too Napoleonic in his understanding of war; Sherman and Sheridan fought the way the Russians fought Napoleon, only they got to lay waste to the land of their enemies rather than their own. Lee never thought to do likewise to Pennsylvania or points north, to his moral credit but his strategic loss.

The North won because it was willing to do things that are now formal war crimes, war crimes they repeated against the Lakota and Cheyenne -- indeed, the same men repeated them. They repeated them against the Apache and others. Once Washington is purged for his embrace of slavery, they'll come from Lincoln and Grant. They'll come for Sherman and Sheridan. They'll come for the whole roster of the late 19th century for its brutality against the Native Americans, and also against the labor unions. And then they'll come for the 20th century too.

This whole project is a sort of treason itself, as a matter of fact. It's a levying of war against America by destroying everything that ever was America. There will never be a rock strong enough to hold against this tide, because America is and always was made up of human beings -- and human beings do wrong, all of us do. No one has clean hands.

We have to learn to live with that. The ones who are setting themselves up as judges of their ancestors won't have clean hands either; they too will rule with fire and war, as indeed they have already begun to do where they have managed to gain a foothold. There is no future of natural right and flourishing human liberty on the other side of their victory, should they gain it. There is only the show we have seen so many times before.

6 comments:

douglas said...

It's hard to show forgiveness when you don't even recognize your own sins. A major problem on the left today (but not only there).

I love your essay "The Smell of Death". Rereading it, something jumped out at me that hadn't previously- "Or think of a fish, if you have ever had one served as they serve it in China: with the head still attached. It is a very different experience to eat such a one, than to eat a fillet."
I must have glossed over it the first time. The Chinese are quite comfortable with the head-on fish- and in fact, my mother and aunts would, when they were children, squabble over the eyes as the tastiest part- which suggests perhaps a cultural element in this that is not quite as basal as you're suggesting. Perhaps it's just how one becomes jaded through exposure, I'm not sure, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Even so, no less true are your observations of the problem of clean hands.

Anonymous said...

Lee didn't own slaves. Lee was against slavery. Lee was offered command of the Union armies.

As for treason, for the Constitution to be ratified three states demanded the right to leave the union at any time for any reason. This was agreed to and the Constitution was ratified. By acknowledging the right of these three states any state had the same right and it was officially acknowledged.

So Lincoln's arguement's were lies and the author by calling the Confederates traitors is at best uninformed. At worst he allies himself with the traitors attempting to destroy America.

To appease the perpetually offended is to be devoured last is at best a forlorn hope. These people hate all that America stands for. Nothing will suffice.

So I draw the line at any memorial, the flag, and any statue. To hell with these taritors.

ymarsakar said...

The Confederacy's plan was most likely to leave the Union and then use their political allies inside the union, other Demoncrats, to create a better deal on the spread of slavery to new states.

Because the Confederacy cannot resolve the issue of whether new territories or new states are free or not free. If they leave forever, that means the Union will have no reason to back slave territories. In other words, Civil War 1 and Civil War 2 were inevitable.

Territorial disputes could barely be resolved in a Union with Congress and President. There was no way to resolve it once the Vatican and foreign powers get involved in America, due to two factions fighting each other.

People think or were told the problem was secession or state's rights. In fact, that was not even the problem as they talked about back then. It is a retro active history re applied over the Secession Documents.

I mentioned the problem with the latter, but few understand the problem of the former either.

As for treason, for the Constitution to be ratified three states demanded the right to leave the union at any time for any reason.

If true, that's only 3. Not 12 or 13 or 9.

By acknowledging the right of these three states any state had the same right and it was officially acknowledged.

That's a rather faulty logic being used there. New York recognized abolition and didn't return slaves to the South, thus using their state right to nullify the Federal Fugitive Slave Act(s). By acknowledging the right of slaves to be independent in New York, any Southern state had the same right and it was officially acknowledged?

Heh.

ymarsakar said...

Satan, using the DeepState, has been messing around with Americans for some time now.

Civil War 1 was just one example, not the first or even last.

Demoncrats did the same type of sabotage and various other shenanigans in the North (as now). People somehow think that if Sherman or Lincoln left the South alone, that there would be peace. That is contradicted by the actual facts, as in 1830s, Missouri instituted what they called the "Mormon extermination order", over disputes concerning pro slave or anti slave voting demographics. Missouri vs Kansas border war. Also "peaceful" fights pre 1861. Southern slave barons and aristos sent bounty hunters up north to lynch and beat abolitionist speakers. "Peaceful counter protesting" perhaps.

None of this was peaceful, but merely tolerated by Americans for abolition. They tolerated it so much they got a war out of it, by showing the South that abolitionists were weaklings worth no respect or honor.

War, as I have cautioned Grim often, is avoided by looking direct at it and making sure everyone understands that there will be one. THen people can avoid it. It's when people who think just talking about it, as I did here, is being a warmonger, that's when people get a war, because the LEft or whatever faction exists, sees this as weakness. And they will do an end run on you and your cities because of it.

Utah war of 1857, where Demoncrat Bucc Prez sent an invasion division after the Utah Territory governor and people... was that also the "peace" promised that Lincoln would have after leaving the South alone?

This stuff had been going on for quite some time. Civil War 1 was just the inevitable consequence of humans obeying Satan. That requires un compacting but not now.

ymarsakar said...

As for Grim's points,I don't have anything to agree or disagree about.

Didn't I talk about this years ago? Repeating myself would be pointless.

ymarsakar said...

I will, however, repeat Brigham Young and Joseph Smith's words.

I dug up a little bit of American history that most people don't know about. A little bit subversive perhaps.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/prophecies-of-joseph-smith?lang=eng

t is a mistaken idea in the inhabitants of the earth to conclude that it will not do for them to yield obedience to the commandments of heaven, lest it should abridge them in their comforts and in their enjoyments; for there is no real peace, there is no real happiness in anything in heaven or on the earth, except to those who serve the Lord. In His service there is joy, there is happiness; but they are not to be found anywhere else. In it there are peace and comfort; but when the soul is filled with joy, with peace, and with glory, and is perfectly satisfied therewith a person even then has but little idea of that which is in store for all the faithful.

Thrust a man into prison and bind him with chains, and then let him be filled with the comfort and with the

2
JOURNAL OF DISCOURSES
glory of eternity, and that prison is a palace to him. Again, let a man be seated upon a throne with power and dominion in this world, ruling his millions and millions, and without that peace which flows from the Lord of Hosts—without that contentment and joy that comes from heaven, his palace is a prison; his life is a burden to him; he lives in fear, in dread, and in sorrow. But when a person is filled with the peace and power of God, all is right with him.

I cannot be satisfied with myself, neither can I be satisfied with this people, unless they live in the enjoyment of the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, having the testimony of Jesus within them. When they live in that manner, they are prepared to judge of all matters that come before them; they are then capable of discerning between truth and error, light and darkness. They can then readily discover the things that are not of God, and distinguish them from those that are. This is the only way for you to know that your leaders are leading you in the path that leads to heaven. Without taking this course, a people or nation is liable to be led astray by their leaders, and thereby be prepared to be destroyed; but when the people understand for themselves—when they know and understand the things of God by the Spirit of revelation, they are not only satisfied but safe. If this people will do as they are told—will please those who preside over them, they will do well for themselves. And if they will do this from morning to evening and from evening to morning, all will be right, and their acts will tend to promote the kingdom of God upon the earth.
July 1857

https://jod.mrm.org/5/1

There were rumors of an army division being sent to Utah.

Fast forward 1859

https://jod.mrm.org/6/342

From the point of view of Utah, Americans killing each other was due to people having accepted Satan. And Utah being more or less safe, thus a reward for faithful action. It is strange that Utah did not decide to secede and accepted Lincoln's amnesty for peace deal.

The First American Civil War was the logical consequences of a people and nation that had begun betraying the founding principles. The Spirit of Satan was thus allowed to fully prey on the humans who think they were free and the humans who knew they were slaves, although in truth all were slaves.

If Lincoln had not made the necessary repentance and sacrifice to the Most High, perhaps a different nation would be now here to continue the work.

One of the consequences of receiving divine messages and warnings, is that I can no longer discount these events as being merely of human work. Doesn't work any longer.