Essays

How The Sultan Got His Groove Back

Michael Cessna April 15, 2022

In 2016, among many other incidents, there was an “attempted coup d’état” in Turkey, in an attempt to unseat Recep Tayiip Erdogan. The quotation marks are there for the simple reason that the Turkish coup was a scam, played for a Turkish audience, only.

Why would a leader – popular or otherwise – take such a dangerous course, as to stage a fake coup d’état against themselves? It doesn’t seem to make sense, even in spite of prepared arrest lists.

In the bizarre world of ‘realpolitik’, however, it makes perfect sense.

Erdogan has survived conspiracy plots before, but he and his nation’s military had come to some level of truce. However, as has become increasingly clear, Erdogan has big dreams, and is willing to take big risks to do it, including actively aiding one of the most savage and brutal terrorist groups seen in the last century.

*Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey, 2018. Photo Credit: Mikhail Palinchak. CCA/4.0*

But, why? What prize could be so valuable, as to risk wars on multiple fronts, with some of the largest, most powerful nations in the world? In simple terms, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to become the first Sultan of a restored Ottoman Empire.

The case for this is fairly straightforward.

Erdogan began injecting Turkey into Levantine politics as far back as 2010, with Turkey’s tacit support of the Palestinian relief flotillas. No one with any experience in the region expected those flotillas to accomplish much, but its tacit support reintroduced the world to Turkey as a significant political player.

This was followed by the appearance of the so-called ‘caliphate’, also known as the ‘Islamic State’. Although ISIL had its genesis from many authors, as the video above clearly demonstrates, its major bases and overland supply corridors originated in southern Turkey.

But again, why? How does active support for ISIL lead to Turkey reforming the Ottoman Empire? The secret is revealed in an ISIL video, since removed by YouTube. The video’s emphasis in its monologue is almost exclusively about destroying the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, drawn up during World War 1, created the modern map of the Middle East as we know it today. The modern nations of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Israel–Palestine, and Saudi Arabia were all the children of that agreement.

“Destroying” Sykes-Picot would result in absolute anarchy — an anarchy into which a “strong leader on a horse” could step, bringing unity, stability and ultimately, peace. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, no matter how legitimate a candidate for Caliph he may have been, would never have been able to bring that peace and stability; the idea that he could bring any kind of unity to the region was simply laughable on its face.

However, a restored Ottoman state, headed by a Turkey with a comparatively untainted reputation, would fit the bill, as it could make the claim that Sykes-Picot was imposed on the region illegally.

But, as possession is always 9/10th of the law, how was this supposed to play out in the military arena? Refer to the map video above, one more time: the main targets of this Turkish ‘grand plan’ were Syria and Iraq. None of the nations in the region would be willing to jump into Turkey’s bed ‘just because’, so some ‘motivation’ needed to be applied to those countries’ peoples.

The so-called ‘Arab Spring‘ provided the opening. Bashar al Assad’s regime was considered to be very stable before the unrest began — but there were still too many US troops in Iraq for the push to start there.

As Syria collapsed into civil war, Iraq consequently fell into even more instability. Two years later, as ISIL exploded out of obscurity, both nations were so badly weakened, they could do little against the terrorist tsunami.

As the IS gained ground, rolling over all the opposition before them, they began to edge southeastward, as if attempting to surround Baghdad, but they never seemed able to close the pincers. Doing so was the logical military move, as it would have cut Baghdad’s only route of ground supply, and would have forced a major battle with Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government — a battle the weak Iraqi government was in no way guaranteed of winning, given the state of its military forces at that time.

ISIS (Grey) Territory Change 2014-2016 Legend: grey: ISIS light/dark yellow: Syrian/ Iraqi Kurdish forces dark red: Iraqi government forces light red: Syrian government forces. Green: Syrian rebel forces. 2016. CCA/4.0

The impending collapse of Shiite-dominated Iraq would, so the thinking went, have drawn in Shiite Iran, which should have sent the main-force heavy units of the Artesh (the Iranian Army) in a US Army-style assault all the way to Baghdad, riding like the cavalry to the rescue in a John Wayne movie, with Arabic subtitles…which would, naturally, have allowed IS to scream for help to rest of the Sunni world against the heretic Shiite aggressor…

That is, of course, not what happened.

*Iran Army in 2018; Date: 28 May 2019. Photo Credit: Amir Hossein Nazari. CCA/4.0*

The Iranians – the Persians of Biblical and Greek history – have been in the war business for several millennia, and saw that trap for what it was. Their response was — to do nothing. When things got very tight for Shiite Baghdad, the Iranians sent in their “Quds Force” (the Iranian version of special forces), because the Quds Force is seen as an advisory group, not a garrison force.

This left ISIL withering on the vine, as no one could openly support such a savage and bestial regime as al Baghdadi’s. Worse, for ISIL, at least, was first Iran’s and then Russia’s not-very-covert aid to the Assad government. Hardening resistance by Kurdish groups like the Peshmerga and the YPG began to slice away ISIL gains, resulting in increasing repression by Erdogan’s regime. Then, everything almost came completely off the rails when the Russians intervened, an event that nearly caused NATO to choose between Turkey – an event that could have caused World War 3 – and dissolution, if it failed to back a member nation under attack.

This failure of ISIL to fulfill its role as sacrificial lamb to the Iranian lion also exposed the dark underbelly of the world of realpolitik, revealing Turkey’s clear role of support, and implying support (tacit or direct) from other countries. In this atmosphere, it would appear that at least some of Erdogan’s military commanders began to whisper about the possibility of a coup. From the stunted development of the coup, it is clear that the coup plotters in the field had little to no direction. In the end, the instant Erdogan put in an appearance, the foot soldiers began giving up.

As a result, Erdogan has now cemented his position within Turkey, as the “hero” who stood up to the military, and prevented the return of military rule…and, of course, disrupted the desultory Allied air campaign against ISIL.

But what about the possible “other” actors? Those foreign powers that may have been – or may be – supporting ISIL directly? Why would they back something like this? Simply: the myriad of Middle Eastern nations are too fractious and chaotic. Replacing them with one state is easier to manage…and take advantage of.

It really is that simple.

TECHNICAL DESTRUCTION

Michael Cessna April 9, 2022

If I were to ask the average reader, “What is the most popular combat vehicle of the last c.100years?”, most people would say something like the World War 2 US M4 Sherman tank…or, perhaps, the Soviet T-34 series, from the same conflict (both of which remain in limited service). Some might even say the Cold War-era Soviet T-55 – which also still soldiers on, around the world — but, like virtually everyone else, they would be wrong.

In fact, the most prolific and widely-deployed combat vehicle in modern history is — the humble “Technical.”

*An improvised fighting vehicle armed with a ZU-23 autocannon.*

The Technical – a term whose etymology is generally believed to have originated in the nation of Somalia during that country’s civil war, which began in 1991 (and which included the disaster that is now known as “Blackhawk Down“), when various NGO’s – unable to legally hire armed private security (i.e., “mercenaries“), instead used “discretionary funds for ‘technical services’” to hire “local security” who were, in fact tribal militiamen, who formed the core of the warring tribal/clan armies of the various warlords vying for control of the failed state.

*A “technical” in Mogadishu at the time of the UNOSOM mission (1992 or 1993)*

There is no single model of Technical. In general, a ‘Technical’, as such, is a civilian vehicle – usually a light pickup truck or some sort of 4-wheel drive vehicle, repurposed as an armed combat vehicle, although such vehicles used solely for troop and logistics transport are still considered Technicals. There are a special class of technicals, the “Gun Truck“, that are actual military vehicles, such as WW2 ‘Willys’ Jeeps or M35-series, M939, M809 and later 2.5ton trucks that have been used since WW2, but especially during the Vietnam War. Until very recently, the closest the US military came to deploying a Technical, was the occasional arming of various CUCV-type vehicles, beginning in the 1970’s (but read on to the end). While certainly improvised for combat, such vehicles were not – at those times – generally available to the public; debate on the term continues.

This was not, however, the first use of vehicles that could be classified as “Technicals.” Initially, almost military vehicles were “technically” (no pun intended) ‘Technicals’, simply because there were few “military vehicles”, as such, anywhere in the world. The first truly extensive use of such vehicles came during World War 2, with the British Army’s “Long Range Desert Group (LRDG)“, one of the predecessors of the famed “Special Air Service (SAS)“. Using whatever light civilian trucks they could scrounge up in Egypt at the time, the LRDG conducted deep raids and reconnaissance against Axis forces and installations during the Desert Campaign of 1940-1943. While this model was copied by a few other units during the war, most armies quickly scrapped the idea after the war was over. The reasons are many, but the primary one is that armies are conservative – even reactionary – by nature, and dislike “ad hoc” solutions to problems, unless there is an emergency situation.

*“T10” a T Patrol Long Range Desert Group 30 cwt Chevrolet, during WW2. Public Domain.*

The public’s first real exposure to Technical-type vehicles, however, was the Great Toyota War of 1986-1987, part of the Chadian–Libyan conflict. The nation of Chad – perpetually poor and fractious – needed a way to counter the heavy, Soviet-supplied combat vehicles of the Libyan army of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Using the only vehicles readily available (mostly Toyota Hilux’s and Land Cruisers) in a manner similar to light cavalry, as well as the WW2 LRDG, the Chadians almost literally “ran rings” around the Libyans, inflicting an estimated 8,500 casualties (dead, wounded and missing), and capturing or destroying an estimated 800 tanks, APCs and other vehicles, as well as around 30 aircraft, wildly out of all proportion to their perceived abilities as an army, French intervention notwithstanding.

(Of note, the Libyan general who lost the Chadian War, Khalifa Haftar), now leads the Libyan National Army (LNA), one of the primary factions in the country’s intermittent civil war.)

While the scale of this defeat brought on pithy jokes and comments about the Libyan Army’s prowess, more sober-minded observers started paying attention to the concept, although little actual work was done during this period.

As the Somali Civil War increased in intensity, the widespread use of technicals was increasingly studied. As the 1990’s evolved into the early-2000’s, and with wars erupting around the world in the wake of the 9-11 attacks in the United States, regular militaries increasingly found themselves facing – and occasionally using – such vehicles, a few salient point became apparent.

*Chadian soldiers on a Toyota Land Cruiser pickup truck in 2008. Photo credit: Czech Ministry of Defense. Public Domain.*

Technicals, by their very nature as lightweight civilian vehicles, are simultaneously cheap,

commonly available, easy to work on, have a ready supply of spare parts, and generally get far better gas mileage than comparable military vehicles. They can also mount a variety of very powerful weapons, from the BGM-71 TOW Missile and other types of ATGMs, to heavy-caliber recoilless rifles, multiple-launch rocket systems such as the seemingly-immortal Type 63, as well as heavier and longer-ranged rockets, and a variety of other improvised rocket launchers and anti-aircraft cannons. (For a much more in-depth study, please see the excellent Tank Encyclopedia article on Techincals, YouTube video linked below.)

*IRGC Ground Force loading a Type 63 MRL, 2017. Photo credit, Tasnim News, CCA/4.0*

For many national armies faced with tight military budgets – and guerrilla and terror groups – around the world, Technicals are increasingly the first choice when swift formations are needed for attack and/or defense. However, the above comes with a very significant caveat: Technicals, as a class of combat vehicle, typically have little or no armor — which is why casualties among Technical crews meeting determined opposition tend to be very high, compared to more heavily-protected units…a consideration that seems to be an acceptable option for the US Army, given its recent adoption of the Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) — all at a staggering cost of nearly $330,000 — per vehicle.

*Infantry Squad Vehicle; 24 January 2020. Public Domain.*

Maybe the Army should call Toyota — their Special Forces did.

Technicals Part 1 (Tank Encyclopedia)

DIY Tanks of Iraq (Source: Vocativ)

*The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To*

The Democratization of Military Training…

Michael Cessna April 7, 2022

Or, Once More With Effort, “Professionals Are Predictable, But The World Is Full Of Amateurs”

It seems that “everyone” has an ax to grind, these days. After over 4000 years of recorded history, it seems that we humans just keep getting more adept at this whole “war thing“.

And – just to be clear – no, this article is not a “how to” do anything. You’re on your own, there.

There are as many reasons to “go to war“, as there are human groups in existence; anytime two or more people decide that they agree on an issue enough that they are willing to do violence – if not agree to lay down their very lives – in that goal’s furtherance, “war” at some level becomes a distinct possibility. And by this, we’re talking about “war” in the sense most people are thinking – replete with dead people, lots of violence, destroyed cities, etc., as opposed to a more figurative example…like, say, “the war on poverty“.

However, most people simply don’t “get” war. From an external view, they do not grasp the intricate web of minutiae that goes into “war”; it’s not simply swinging a sword, or pulling the trigger of a firearm, or pushing a button to launch a missile. It is not only knowing when to do so, but also is knowing how and when to do these things, as well as understanding the systems that enable these actions.

While the individual “spear carrier” does not need to understand the intricacies of the industrial base that created his sword or rifle, his leaders most definitely do. The real challenge for any prospective leader or groups of leaders, though, has always been how to teach some kid – who may even agree with their goals, as far as they can understand them – how to swing that sword, or shoot that rifle.

Military training and military science have evolved over time. Even in the days when muscle power was the definitive factor in combat – swinging a sword is a very physically demanding job, when done for any length of time – it was an understood fact that the person who worked from a regularized system of actions (“drills“, or even “kata’s“, in modern parlance) in combat had a much better chance of winning the fight than someone who simply ran up and tried to smash their opponent in the face with a bat.

However, that kind of training has always been hard to come by – either there simply were not enough people with the knowledge to teach it, or the teaching took too long — it was said of the dreaded English and Welsh Longbowmen, that “if you wanted to train the archer, start by training the archer’s grandfather.” This is why projectile weapons were continuously evolving, much faster than swords and polearms.

The reason for this, militarily speaking, is quite simple: maneuver is a very powerful tool, and if you can hurt your opponent at long range and still stay on the move, that is definitely what you want to do…However, this brought on other problems: horses are faster than humans, but they require a large and intricate infrastructure to obtain and support, complete with specialized fields of labor, such as the farrier; specialized saddle-makers; special armor and weapons to maximize fighting from horseback, and on and on…

This translates across virtually every conceivable field – the never ending quest to “tweak” the equipment you have, and to find The Next Big Thing.

These all contribute to the training problem – “training, techniques (or ‘tactics’) and practices (or, ‘procedures’)” (TTP) – since the TTP’s for any given concept or field are in a constant state of flux.

What this translated to, as recently as the 1980’s, was getting some people together, teaching them how to march, then handing them each a rifle and a few rounds of ammunition to practice, then sending them out to do battle for the “glory” of whatever…with usually predictable results. And make no mistake – this phenomenon was in no way limited to guerrilla bands of former farmers and shopkeepers who had never held a weapon in their hands with lethal intent. There were plenty of armies around the world who did exactly this — and in some places, still do, as of this writing.

But today, things have largely changed. With the advent of the internet, the World Wide Web and digital file sharing, it is now possible to create the core of a training program – at almost every level – simply by searching out the appropriate files and videos. Nothing, obviously, can replace actually running around an assault course with a real weapon, but it is entirely possible to locate acceptable-quality videos and training manuals online to show a person exactly how to run the course – it is up to the searcher to then put into practice what the videos and manuals teach them (see the second video, below).

People love to share; that’s a feature of human interaction. Whether it’s cooking recipes, flower arrangements, tips on fixing your car or what have you, chances are, someone out there has not only written something about it, but may have a video to teach you how to do it for yourself. What’s more, their advice is likely free…whether they intended it that way, or not.

Military training is no different. Finding information in the form of .PDF manuals – everything from the basics of plumbing, to field food service, to how to build a fortified bunker, to just exactly how to go about “taking that hill” – whether created in a government printing office, or written by a private person (whether they are a professional soldier or a gifted amateur), is ridiculously easy, in most parts of the world.

Military training video courses – some of them quite extensive, as in the first video, below – are equally accessible for most people with the acumen to navigate LiveLeak, YouTube or Vimeo. For the raw, untrained amateur, the sheer wealth, depth and breadth of information available is staggering, so much so, that it can overwhelm them. For the experienced trainer, however, there is a vast Archive of tools to study, that anyone who knows what they’re looking for can access for their training program, for free, between their morning Lifer Juice and lunch.

For the aspiring totalitarian, this is a terrible, terrible thing, because it undermines the State’s monopoly on the application of force as a tool of control — if every Tom, Dick and Harriet in your country knows how a military force operates (even if only in the crudest, most basic manner), your loyalist military will be facing a staggering number of enemies, far more than they have ammunition to deal with, and possibly so many that they will begin to desert, rather than try to plant your boot for you…Much more so, when the enemy is literally at the gates, and you find yourself begging and press-ganging your citizens into your army, handing them weapons for free that you previously prevented them from owning — that’s the real takeaway from Ukraine, but I digress…..

Of course, if you are a Libertarian with the proper outlook on the world in general – and human civilization in particular – this is probably the closest to heaven that you are going to get to, since The People now have the means to stand up to those professional armies that you are so worried about. (We’ll leave talk about casualties another time…)

So — the next time a politician starts talking about limiting the availability of, or the access to, information – of whatever stripe – remember that information is the real root of all power, and if a politician doesn’t want you to have it, you should probably be seriously worried about why they don’t want you to have it.

War of the Revenants

Michael Cessna March 29, 2022

Or, The Great Game in the One-N-Twenty, as the Shade of Sykes-Picot Rears Its Ugly Head

rev·e·nant
‘rev??näN,-n?nt/
noun
noun: revenant; plural noun: revenants

a person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.

Origin
early 19th century: French, literally ‘coming back,’ present participle (used as a noun) of revenir .

[Source – Google]

A walk down Memory Lane, because even with all eyes focused on Ukraine, China and the multiple, deepening scandals in the United States, there are other enemies who are still out there, enemies thought dead…but who are very much alive.

In the week preceding January 10, 2016, the conflict in war-torn Iraq and Syria entered a new, and extremely dangerous phase. To understand why, we need to dial back, and quickly review the last few years of the regional conflict.

In 2003, the United States invaded the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. The why’s and wherefores of the US invasion and conquest of Iraq aside, this seminal event is what sparked the state of affairs.

The origins of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are shrouded in confusion and rumor, but it is generally agreed that it accreted from several sources, including the Jordanian-born Salafist radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, survivors of US detention camps, including their nominal leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at the time, and a group of surviving officers of the disbanded Iraqi Army and the Iraqi Republican Guard Corps, with at least some funding, advice and moral support from the remnants of the Al-Qaeda organization.

However, it is vital to remember that ISIL’s initial wave of success, riding on the back of the confusion caused by the fallout of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, petered out in early 2013, and was only revived by under-the-table assistance from Turkey:

This allowed ISIL to operate from its territory, under the guise of supporting the anti-Assad “Free Syrian Army”. In looking over the date-progression in the animated map, above, it is absolutely clear that ISIL was using base areas in southern Turkey, unfettered by Turkish security forces.

Then, as Russian and Syrian government forces closed in on the FSA- and ISIL-controlled city of Aleppo, in the north of Syria, Turkey doubled down, intervening directly in the conflict, while chastising the US over its refusal to designate various factions of Kurdish ground forces as “terrorist organizations” – primarily because even the Presidential administration of Barack Obama had finally accepted that the Kurds were the one group that it could fully rely upon in the area, within their limits. As well, several Gulf Arab States, led by a Saudi Arabia currently eye-deep in a vicious ground war on its own southern border with Yemen, hinted that they, too, might attempt to intervene to prevent the total collapse of anti-Assad resistance.

For Turkey’s part, this is easy to understand. Turkey desires a much greater role in directing regional affairs, as was demonstrated in their active support for pro-Palestinian activists in the “Freedom Flotilla’s” of 2010 and 2014. Where Turkey erred was in assuming that it could secure its southern borders, as well as play ‘kingmaker’ in both Iraq and Syria, by supporting – however tacitly – groups such as the FSA, ISIL and the Al-Nusra Front, while ignoring its own Kurdish problem.

This, more than anything, is what undermined Turkey’s position: ethnic Kurdish areas comprise the southeastern one-third of Turkey’s territory, as Kurdish forces have coalesced over the last twenty-five or so years, and become far more professional militarily. Turkey’s adamant refusal to even consider negotiation with the Kurds brought it to the brink of war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as the Russian colossus ground away at the groups Turkey was supporting, and the US and Russia no longer simply provided aid to the Kurds, but are coordinating operations with them at some level.

The danger for Turkey, at this point, was abundantly clear: acknowledgement of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq or Syria would put pressure on Ankara to do likewise, and end its ongoing internal campaign against the Kurdish PKK in its southern region…in effect, this would severely weaken Turkey and ultimately result in its partition.

In threatening to intervene significantly in Syria – an intervention that, although left unspoken, would certainly bring Turkish and Russian military forces into direct conflict with each other – Turkey banked on its membership in NATO to deter Russia from taking any substantive military action against Turkey directly.

This was whistling past the graveyard, as Russia had already invested far too much to simply back away. That, in turn, left NATO, and the US, with the stark choice of abandoning a member-state, which risked destroying the alliance wholesale, or in actively aiding Turkey militarily, an action which would certainly lead to a general war — in other words, with no hyperbole, World War III.

This was headed off by cooler heads in NATO, who told Turkey flatly that Article V did not apply if Turkey was the original aggressor, which it most certainly was.

But what of the other players involved in this? Why are they rattling their sabres?

Saudi Arabia is divided. Internally, there are certainly factions within the Saudi power structure who actively support ISIL, as much as there are others who are adamantly opposed to the terrorist regime. However, Saudi Arabia is tasting, for the first time in a very long time, the addictive drug of military power with its intervention in Yemen. Appearing as a strong and powerful champion of Sunni Islam is seen as a vital necessity, due to the internal divisions within Saudi Arabia.

In the case of Iran, they have been at the “war thing” for several thousand years, and are quite competent, militarily speaking, when its ‘government du jour’ gives its military the chance to actually do the tasks that they are armed and uniformed to carry out. This is clear in Iran’s response to the threat to their fellow Shiites in Iraq.

In the map video above, ISIL’s strategic intent in Iraq can be discerned by watching the area around Baghdad: ISIL wisely did not attempt to actually storm the mega-city [1], but neither did they attempt to cut its road access. That it could have done so at any time should be painfully clear, but yet that did no act to do so. The reason for this seemingly-puzzling action – or lack of it – as the Iraqi Army was collapsing before the ISIL juggernaut.

[1] — Megacities In Future Operations

Iran saw that one of ISIL’s primary strategic goals was to goad them into sending in the Iranian army, the “Artesh”, to save Shia Iraq from ISIL. This would have resulted in ISIL calling on the wider Sunni world to wage its version of “jihad” against a group it hates worse than any other, as it views Shia Islam as a terrible heresy to its own beliefs, a heresy far more terrible and threatening to itself than other nations or religious faiths.

Instead, Iran sent the Quds Force, Iran’s “special operations” force. Sending in this very capable unit demonstrated Iran’s resolve, bolstered the flagging Iraqi Army, and required only a very tiny “footprint” on the ground.

This caught ISIL flat-footed, and at the end of its initial supply chain. At this point, ISIL fatally turned inward, trying to organize its rear areas, while getting as much equipment as possible from its suppliers, including Turkey.

This was an inevitably fatal move, because ISIL could not create the necessary internal infrastructure to support a modern military force in the absence of massive external aid – neither Iraq nor Syria were ever very heavily industrialized, and ISIL combat forces destroyed much of what heavy industries were present. Similarly, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIL’s religious dogma severely limits its ability to create the vibrant defense industrial base without which it cannot win, in the absence of massive supply from a friendly foreign government.

Thus, the minute Russia injected itself into the conflict, essentially replicating what the US did in the early phases of its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, ISIL and its allies – “moderate” and otherwise – appeared doomed, as there was no way that they could respond to precision Russian airstrikes.

Unless Turkey tried to intervene to aid them directly – and that was “a bridge too far” for Ankara.

The days of ISIL and its allies seemed to be numbered, as late as 2018…but, the Islamic State – like a poorly-treated cancerous growth – did not die out. Frayed nerves, along with poor decision-making and thought processes have allowed this regional conflict to metastasize into a world-spanning war, as happened almost exactly one hundred years ago.

The Unseen Blade

Michael Cessna March 25, 2022

Or, Professionals Are Predictable, But The World Is Full Of Amateurs

Any reader of this publication is almost certainly familiar with any number of terrorist and/or guerilla groups. Indeed, we see their depredations on an almost daily basis — depending on where the reader lives in the world, terror group news may be the only news available.

But, from a purely psychological point, knowledge of the various terror groups around the world is comforting: with relative ease, the inquisitive person can find out the basics on virtually any group with perhaps an hour or two of research online. “Google Fu” is a working verb, now. In that sense, groups like the so-called “Islamic State“, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and any other “dead-enders” around the world are not really all that scary — when you learn about your enemy, you steal some of their power, and make them that much less, in your mind.

But — what about the group you’ve never heard of?

What I mean, here, is that unknown group — the group on no one’s radar. The group that sits quietly, like a spider at the center of its web, waiting for a hapless fly to get stuck. The group that explodes (sometimes, literally) onto the world scene: Who are these people? What do they want? How many of them are there? And so on…

The cold facts of life are that, for all the uncountable billions of dollars spent on the kaleidoscope of intelligence disciplines by various countries, there are well in excess of seven billion people in the world, currently. No matter how much intelligence agencies may desire it to be otherwise, there is simply no way to monitor every individual in a meaningful, timely manner.

Case in point – David Coleman Headley.

Headley (a committed member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group) was that group’s principle reconnaissance operative that they used to scout the city of Mumbai, prior to the group’s bloody attack on the city in 2008. Headley might have been many things…James Bond, he was not. He made mistake after mistake, “bush-league” errors in tradecraft that no operator with the slightest pretense to competence would have made.

And he still got away with it.

Although he did not actually take part in the attacks in India, Headley continued his career as the “perfect” terror scout (a consequence of his United States citizenship, and his West European features – inherited from his American mother, a daughter of the Philadelphia Society) Headley was able to move freely around the world, scouting multiple potential attack locations for the LeT. It was not until he turned up on the United States’ Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) radar (when he attempted to scout out an attack location in Denmark for Al Qaeda) that the DHS agents who intercepted him in Chicago, Illinois in 2009, began seriously questioning him. Headley, assuming that DHS knew all about his Mumbai scouting work as well, confessed without prompting.

Intelligence agencies throughout the West had absolutely no inkling of the scale of Headley’s connection with terror groups prior to his “on loan” work for Al Qaeda.

But Headley was, indeed, ultimately working for well-known terrorist groups, most of whom were under some level of surveillance; Headly was not an “independent operator”. The same rules applying to Headley, applied equally to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Britain’s MI6 and the old Soviet KGB, as well as its replacement, the Russian Federal Security Bureau (FSB).

What follows is a cautionary tale, one that explains why eternal vigilance at the individual level is the price we all pay for the benefits of globalization and a much smaller world than existed a hundred years ago.

When examining the structure of any group, whatever its aim, the following five archetypal people must exist to make the organization work:

The People Person. This is the person who recruits people to whatever the group’s stated cause is. How public that statement of purpose is, directly affects how quickly a group can expand its numbers with “spear carriers”.
The Banker. This is the fund-raiser, the person who obtains money for the Cause, whoever that is. The Banker is the person who finds the money necessary to make the group function externally — it’s one thing to gripe in private. To act outside the status of a discussion group, money – a lot of money – is required.
The Support Person. This is the person who makes the drudgery work: they take the money provided by the Banker, and use it to purchase all the “stuff” that the Cause needs, whether that is buildings, office supplies, advertising space, food, medical supplies, etc. They might use the people recruited by the People Person, but this is not strictly necessary.
The Idea Person. This is the person who can form and articulate the Big Idea, both to the core group and the recruits, but also to the outside world. This person is sometimes the Leader, but not always.
The Leader. The Leader is the “front man”. They may also be the Idea Person, but not always. This is the person who can be held up as the prime example of the goals of the organization; this can, obviously assume messianic proportions.

Aside from the possible overlap between the Idea Person and the Leader, these people are mutually exclusive of each other — it is virtually impossible for a single person to perform even two of these functions, far less, all five. This is a very good thing, as it becomes increasingly more difficult to assemble more or less complete strangers into a functioning group.

However, if three of these archetypal people do assemble, with some form of malicious intent, the potential scale of destruction becomes terrifying. Below we’ll look at a “near-miss”…a near miss incidentally, that led – in a peripheral way – to this author joining The Freedomist.

(NB: This specific incident ultimately led to the author’s joining the old MilitaryGazette blog, because while I had joked for years that I could equip an army out of an Army-Navy store, I had never actually tried to price it out…but that’s another story, entirely.)

Many years ago, this author was contacted by a friend on Facebook, who sent a link to a story at Cracked! magazine. The story was exactly the kind of thing I love to read. But it was just one entry in an article full of similar entries. So, I read on. That led me to the first part of this cautionary tale: the story of David Deng.

David Deng (real name: Yupeng Deng), a Chinese national, walked into an Army-Navy surplus store in Southern California in 2008, bought a used uniform, and put together enough patches to look believable (to those with no experience to speak of) as a colonel in the US Army Special Forces, styling himself as something that translates into English as the “Supreme Commander, U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve“.

He then opened what he termed an “Army recruiting office” in Temple City…but he only recruited people just arriving in the United States from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), people who did not speak very good English, and had very little real knowledge of the United States, or of its military. Deng presented the US Army as if it were a ‘tong‘, in which a person had to pay a fee to join, along with monthly dues, and would have their citizenship “fast-tracked”. Additionally, they would receive uniforms and military identification cards that would give them some level of immunity for minor offenses, like traffic tickets. Of course, the uniforms came from Army-Navy surplus stores, and the identification cards came off of Deng’s printer…but his “recruits” didn’t know that.

Deng managed to get his private “army” into various parades and celebrations in Los Angeles County’s Chinese community, including photo-ops with local political figures. Although people thought this “unit” to be rather strange, and somewhat sloppy (Deng, not being military himself, had no real idea of what or “how” to teach his “troops”), no serious questions were raised…

…For nearly four years.

It was not until 2011 that Deng’s scam was blown, when some of his recruits tried to pay their monthly dues at real Army recruiting offices, that David Deng’s army appeared on the radar of the real US Army…and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI then swiftly moved in, and rounded up Deng and his hapless recruits. The FBI quickly determined that his recruits actually thought that they really were in the US Army, and that they really had “enlisted” to serve the United States, and earn their citizenship. US courts declined to prosecute Deng’s recruits, as a result – no wrongdoing on their part, just falling for a vicious, narcissistic crook.

What was shocking, however, were the numbers involved.

The FBI knows for certain that Deng had recruited about one-hundred and fifty people…but they believe the actual numbers could be far higher — on the order of eight hundred individuals. For anyone who knows anything about armies, that’s enough people for anything from an infantry company (the number the FBI knows about for certain), up to a battalion (for the larger number).

To give you an idea of what eight hundred armed men can do, eight hundred ISIL fighters, riding in Toyota pickup trucks, captured the city of Mosul, Iraq in 2014.

It is a good thing that Deng never had weapons to hand out to his army, along with any sort of real training and/or lethal intent for them…

…Which brings us to our next person: Jeffery Alan Lash.

Pacific Palisades is a quiet, upscale suburb of Los Angeles, California. One sunny day, someone walking along the street became curious about an SUV that had been parked in the same spot for almost two weeks. Peering in, they saw a figure that appeared to be dead, and immediately called police…who were already en route to the scene, summoned by another phone call.

When the police arrived, they knew they had an unusual scene: the vehicle and the identification on the remains identified a local man, who lived just a few doors down the street. When they received no answer to a knock at the door, the police obtained a warrant to enter…and just as quickly backed out, and called in the police department’s EOD unit.

It took hours to empty the residence. Within, police found over 1,200 firearms of various types, piles of miscellaneous gear and equipment..and so much ammunition that they stopped counting it early on, and simply weighed it for the evidence locker — ultimately, between five and six tons of ammunition, in various calibers, were recovered.

While the specific details of the story – strange as they are – make for an interesting read, the takeaway for this article is that this one man had managed to somehow put the money together to assemble a large enough quantity of small arms to outfit a battalions-worth of people, of eight hundred to one-thousand troops…and did it without appearing on anyone’s radar, until he apparently died of natural causes.

Now, I want to be clear, here: there is absolutely no evidence that has come to light, to indicate that David Deng and Jeffery Alan Lash ever knew each other, or were in any way insipired by one or the other. However, in these two stories, we have two of the five archetypes: the People Person (Deng) and the Banker (Lash) who tried to be the Support Person.

Lash’s arms buying – whatever he was buying weapons for – could have equipped some kind of military force. Not very well, but those hypothetical troops would have been armed with real weapons, and would have been capable of executing some level of military mission…again, not very well, but far better than most guerilla armies are capable of doing, especially when they start out.

Likewise, Deng’s recruits were never given any kind of real training that would have allowed them to carry out any kind of realistic mission…but they could have been given that training.

Aside from them not knowing each other, what Deng and Lash lacked was an Idea Person and a Leader. In effect, the two were, hypothetically speaking, just two steps away from creating a real, functional military unit: they needed to have known each other, and needed someone to give them direction on what to do. Speaking as someone who has managed battalion-scale Issue Points and Warehousing operations in a military context, the author is left somewhat breathless at the potential these two men represent — although the days of Bannerman’s are long gone, and while these men – primarily Lash, in this instance – didn’t assemble the kind of gear or carry out the training for Deng’s recruits that I would have, they did far better than they had any right to.

At the end of the day, though, what does the foregoing actually mean?

In a word (okay, three words), globalization and mass production – whatever their very real benefits might be – have also brought into sharp focus the fact it is relatively easy to assemble a force that can function as a military unit, in a relatively short period of time…given more money, it is equally possible to assemble and train that force to some level of competence above that of a street gang, using materials freely available online.

You, the Reader of this piece, need to remain vigilant — there are plenty of David Deng’s and Jeffery Alan Lash’s out there in the world. Do not assume that because it looks complicated, it can’t be done.

Find a way to get inside the enemy’s OODA Loop.

Forewarned, is forearmed.

Original Sin Versus Corruption In America’s Racial History

Bill Collier July 25, 2021

Bill Collier- American history is a story of uneven and unequal advancements toward a totally free, prosperous, and pluralistic society of equals, but advancements often far ahead of any contemporary country, even to this day. America’s racial history is governed by two factions, those we may call egalitarian republicans or pluralists and those who we may broadly call racialists who basically believe race defines most or all of who you ever can be and that, at best, races are separate but, at worse, inequal. Racialist versus pluralist worldviews have largely governed America’s mixed history on race.

The present “crisis” over race has the racialists masquerading as egalitarians and attacking anyone, whether racialists or pluralists, of the original sin of those who were racists and whose skin happened to be white. The attempt to impugn and shame every white person with the sins of other white people, or by accusing them of the injustice of white privilege, is itself a racialist sentiment that undermines and directly attacks pluralism.

The irony here is that the racialists who make “whiteness” their new “original sin” are using an extra-Biblical but “traditional” doctrine created by white people to essentially guilt themselves as born sinners because of Adam. The idea of collective guilt in relation to original sin has been challenged and overthrown in many Christian circles.

The concept that prevails today is that we inherit a corrupted nature, but not any guilt, from Adam. Whereas in the past the possibility of being redeemed from your collective guilt was deemed slim and uncertain, today we understand that through Christ we can both find forgiveness from our actual individual sin, which is the only sin we bear, and transfiguration of our inner man to heal us of our sin nature.

But this idea of collective guilt is an essentially European invention now being perpetrated and applied by people whose own racist ideology is aimed at demonizing people of European ancestry. The only way to even hope for any grace is to behave in a way that shows your shame for your collective guilt and that acknowledges your inherent and unredeemable racism which can only be held at bay through total loyalty to the Democratic Party.

This is classic medieval Catholicism: all people are born sinners, they remain so, and only through absolute obedience to the Church hierarchy and its ordained secular institutions, including king or emperor, can your sinful nature be suppressed in the hopes that, maybe, you will eventually gain enough grace to make it to purgatory or even heaven itself.

For the wokatariate, white people are all born racists who bear the collective guilt of their race which, according to the narrative, are the worse oppressors, colonizers, imperialists, slavers, and racists in human history. Indeed, without the white race and its ideas, the world would probably be a veritable paradise run as a socialist global collective.

Never mind that the true target of this propaganda is the worldview we consider essential to the Western Tradition or America’s heritage of ever-increasing freedom for more and more people in more and more areas of their lives. The heart of this war which SEEMS to be a racist war against white people is a war on the arc of America’s history toward more freedom for every single human being without exception.

Like the priests, prelates, nobles, and kings and emperors of the medieval period, today’s ruling class are of the same group who are being guilted and shamed. The wokatariate are in fact mostly manned by white people and almost exclusively funded by very rich white people. This looks essentially like an almost all-white genocidal conspiracy against….white people!

But the truth is that the wokatariate, the people running and benefiting from this racialist woke assault on freedom, know that their guilting and shaming is all based on bad doctrines and bad intentions. To be clear, white genocide isn’t a serious aim of anyone in power and to believe that is to fall for the distraction.

The wokatariate are not “ironically” absolving themselves of the “original sin of inherited white supremacy.” They are “proving” their commitment to suppressing their latent racism through pushing through a neocommunist agenda, by force if need be because, after all, all the people who oppose this are either un-reconstructed white supremacists or their “captive” minority collaborators.

Again, as with the ruling class who used original sin to keep the population down, today’s erstwhile ruling class want to use the original sin of racism to suppress 70% of the population who are white and to buy off and capture the “victims” whose only hope for liberation is through the necommunism of the wokatariate.

It may be lost on some that the wokatariate isn’t organically representative of any person of color or those communities. A movement among black Americans to rectify their past grievances and claim equal standing within the America population as equals in every way has not taken root. Efforts to hijack issues and grievances by the left or to essentially dismiss those grievances and simply be the only alternative to the left by the right do not constitute an organic African-American Freedom Movement.

In the heyday of the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s monopoly over Western Christian culture and religion, only Saints were deemed to be above the original sin, fully redeemed from its influence. But the added twist of our era is twofold: some groups of people are deemed innocent of this guilt because they or their ancestors were oppressed by “white males”, and others, the wokatariate ruling class, are deemed living saints who are above reproach by virtue of their, well, virtue signaling!

Woke racialism is a vehicle to power, none of its claims or ideas are significant beyond guilting people or making them feel like helpless victims. Few among the wokatariate BELEIVE their own claims.

The choice of attacking whiteness is based on two key factors: the freedom-building ideas which are essential to America’s overall arc of history were mostly produced by white men and, to a lesser degree white women, and the simple expediant fact white males at this time tend to strongly opposed authoritarianism and tyranny. If “whiteness” is now sin itself than clearly all white ideas, including the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, are all “polluted” by their “whiteness.”

Cue the social justice totalitarianism and cancel culture to silence any conversation that challenges these notions of comand and control economics that benefits only the few.

This isn’t to say white people, or white males, are more disposed toward freedom-building ideas than others are. It is simply, and accidentally, the current reality. For instance, this idea of being “allies” of “people of color” ends when the “people of color” happen to be Cubans who are even more predisposed toward freedom-building ideas than white males or Haitians who are more predisposed toward capitalism and freedom.

Democrats have made it clear, freedom seeking people from Haiti and Cuba, who tend more toward opposing the anti-freedom ideas of the wokatariate, need not apply. But people from other countries who both embrace socialism and are coming with expectations of aid, are welcome.

The slavers who polluted America’s history believed all Africans were incapable of being fully human and civilized. The very Party, the Democratic Party, that once championed this even worse version of original sin, which made Africans especially and irredeemably execrable, is still clinging to the same ideas.

The change is in who is the target, but the goal of absolute monopoly power remains the same. One may find the whole history of the Democratic Party is one of using some version of racialism and original sin to create victims and sinners whose only hope, but no guarantee, of redemption is absolute obedience to the ruling class.

But the ideas that systemic racism remains affixed to at least some of our structures and laws or that vast portions of our population may harber inherited ideas and prejudices that hinder our advancement toward a free and pluralistic society of equals cannot be dismissed. We being classical “republicans” and pluralists, we cannot whitewash the inherited corruption which comes because very strong groups harboring racialist ideas created laws and fostered prejudices that are not entirely rooted out of our society.

Many racists ideas permeate the way Democrats run inner cities, using welfare to disrupt black families, gun control to keep them all disarmed and pliant, softness on gangs to keep them in crises, socialism to keep them in a state of dependency, abortion to control their population, and a host of petty and contractory laws and codes to make it easy to jail them and use them as slave labor.

Yes, black people tend to vote for Democrats. It is a sick humor of history that a Party which has institutionally never disavowed its inherent racialist nature and that continues to use the false doctrine of collective guilt for original sin has captured the very people its ideas once literally enslaved. The black community is being sold the heady elixir of victimhood and entitlement to reparations and the easy excuse of racism as the only reason for any of their failures or problems. This elixir is a poison, the white rulers of the wokatariate are quite content to see the ghettos remain poor, unsafe, and left behind in perpetuity.

As an important aside, we must state that the grievances of the black community in relation to their own country are legion and deserve to be genuinely addressed. The truth is that Democratic Party handouts, even though they come with poison pills aimed at the black family, are a far cry from the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps there is no racism holding you back” narrative of the right.

The perverted evolution of the original sin doctrine, of racialism, and slaving of the many to serve the few, have emerged as woke communism, perpetuated by a close collaboration between Democratic loyalists in the corporate world, in academia, in the press and entertainment industry, and in government. Their neocommmunism combines woke original sin with a corporate-political power alliance controlled by a party that is itself controlled by a small body of the wokatariate ruling class, almost ALL filthy rich white males!

But the vital issue here remains that there are in fact ideas, laws, and structures that are based in historic racism. It also remains that certain assumptions and prejudices, while not proving racism or any collective guilt, are the seed-kernels of racialist sentiment. Many Americans of every so-called race have been inculcated with racialist and intolerant prejudices, from black people thinking all white people are morally inferior, to white people habitually seeing black people as an “other”, for no reason but their race.

It is true the white prejudice tends to impact black people far more negatively than the anti-white prejudices being imparted into the black community by the wokatariate. But morally, the sentiment that people ought to be judged based on assummed inferior inherent traits, whether they include racism or backwardness, is the same. Whether a black person or white person or any group of people assumes the characterological inferiority of others, the sentiment is best described as prejudice and intolerance.

But, as a point of fact, the victim privilege or racism of the black man is of far less a threat than white prejudice against blacks and is nothing compared to the wokatariate’s new take on original sin. Indeed, the myth of so-called white supremacy or even the very real legacy of bias among a plurality to majority of white people isn’t anything like the threat to the whole country posed by the wokatariate.

But if America’s history on race is uneven but advancing freedom for more and more people at greater levels, and if we rightfully desire to rectify wrongs and finish the work until no American is left behind, the wokatariate want to reverse the arc of our history and bend it back toward original sin, shaming and guilting, and thereby authoritarianism.

We stand at a threshold of a future dominated by the Party that is the very inheritor of the old Democratic Party’s institutional bent toward authoritarianism versus something else. This “something else” isn’t the GOP, whose modern form of denying race as an issue betrays their abolitionist roots, and whose ability to stand against the Democrats is pathetic.

The “something else” needs to be a freedom-building movement of the People that brings all people of all “races” together, addresses the historical and present-day grievances and problems of every community, and does so on the solid and unalterable foundation of the original spirit and intent of the US Bill of Rights!

Authoritarianism Is America’s Perpetual Foe

Bill Collier July 11, 2021

From old King George to Hitler and the Soviets, from the plantation slave holders to neonazis, and from overwrought religious fanatics and the new “woke” communists, Americans have always had to contend with authoritarianism abroad and even at home. This bent toward authoritarianism can be seen in little to major outbursts throughout our history: slavery, putting down the whiskey rebellion, the trail of tears, jim crow, and the list goes on to include the anti self-preservation acts in major cities and Democrat-run states in their war against the Second Amendment.

Authoritarianism is an instinct toward the forced submission of other people to your will against their own wishes and interests, even if you, the authoritarian, imagine you know what’s best for them. Whether the authoritarian is just lording it over others like some third world tinhorn junta or some idealistic do-gooder like the prohibitionists, the effect is the same: human agency and human dignity suffer and so does human rights and human flourishing.

Throughout our country’s history the threads of the authoritarian bent versus “freedomism” have played back and forth, here and there, each sometimes gaining the upper hand. The question of whether this “land of the free and home of the brave” will be truly free or lean backwards in societal evolution toward authoritarianism remains unresolved.

Freedomism is basically the belief that all humans are spiritually sovereign beings created in the image of God with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and wealth. Some of our core self-evident rights, if we believe in the inherent spiritual sovereignty of every individual, include self-preservation, self-determination, self-reliance, self-expression, and free participatory association. They require equitable and equal respect by ALL institutions (including government, business, and all others) for our human dignity, human agency, and the inviolate sanctity of our rights, persons, and property.

A world in which freedomism reigns supreme is a world of prosperity and happiness. A world where authoritarianism has even a little sway is a world where poverty grows, unhappiness spreads, and hate and discontent infect the populace.

Name an ill, such as racism and worker exploitation, child abuse or wealth inequities, social injustice or corruption, and a strict adherance to the spirit and heart of freedomism would substantially mitigate or solve that problem. But authoritarianism can never, ever, solve such problems. It isn’t organic or human in its foundation. It is akin to the introduction of one invasive species to solve the problem of another invasive species that becomes a far worse problem.

If you complain about “gun violence” and your instinct is to outlaw guns, then you are, to some degree, embracing authoritarianism. This knee-jerk response won’t solve the core problem of violence and criminality which results from a lack of respect for the rights, persons, and property of others. This disrespect for basic human dignity by the criminals and malefactors stems from the blatant disrespect meted out by our major institutions, including academia, the press, major corporations, and the government.

It has become fashionable to paint your authoritarianism in the colors of social justice and equity. The modern American “woke communist” isn’t like the Leninists or Maoists, per se, but more like the modern Chinese. They create a wicked partnership between woke communists in the corporate world and woke communists in the government. The supreme “woke communist” shot-callers don’t sound or look like the communists of old.

The evolution of communism from a strict state-ownership model to a partnership between Party loyalists in all institutions, including private and public, acting in ruthless disregard for basic human dignity, is alarming. It may have fooled too many people for too long who were looking for the classic neosoviet or maoist communist.

The basic essence of the communist model isn’t necessarily “state ownership of the means of production.” That’s so 19th and 20th century. The basic common thread is the use of authoritarianism to produce a society of managed outcomes. It requires the atomization of each individual so that they can be molded and shaped into a new type of human being. The modern equivalent of the “Soviet Man” is the “woke individual.” But, like the Soviet Man, the woke individual becomes a mere cog in a machine that uses bogeyman fears and utopian promises to keep everyone in line.

It’s all authoritarianism. While it is good to know the main new authoritarian threat that exists today, it is useful both to see the overall authoritarianism thread throughout human history and to be careful lest we also fall prey to the siren call.

Authoritarianism is essentially a lazy, quick-fix, silver bullet approach to problem solving at the level of society itself. Just cut the gordian knot by mandating that people become whatever you imagine in your theories they should become and, while some dissenters may be “necessarily” punished and harmed for the “common good”, the end justifies the means. The managed progressive evolution of society, in our manifestation of authoritarianism that seems to be a genderless and undifferentiated mass of atomized individuals without faith or family, demands that we punish those who hinder the advancement we have planned!

If your ideas aren’t such that people can adopt and use them for individual and mutual profit solely on the basis of freewill participation, then your ideas are total garbage. If your idea cannot flourish unless it shows intolerance towards all who don’t accept it or want to practice it, then, also, your idea is garbage.

Authoritarianism is tempting for three reasons: the submitter no longer bears personal responsibility for their actions or welfare, the imposer gains the wicked satisfaction of lording it over others, and the theorist satisfies themselves that they have magically solved the perceived societal problems with a simple solution.

Overbearing parents, machismo husbands, the karens and kens, and henpecking wives all have the spirit of authoritarianism bubbling up within their souls. Among the authoritarians and their followers there is no doubt this bent toward dominating others and disrespecting their basic human dignity is strong, and yet always “justified.”

The war between authoritarianism and freedomism is ancient and will never end. Even if we Freedomists gained the upper hand in America, the next generation would always be faced with some new manifestation of the authoritarian spirit. Some humans bend toward a wicked desire to control other humans and use all kinds of sophistry, including bogeyman fears and utopian promises, to justify their own inhumanity.

Today it is the woke communist that is our chief threat, a domestic foe to our freedom. The woke communist doesn’t just want state ownership of the means of production but a hybrid partnership of corporate and government power under the single control of the Party. Like all communists, they want a communalized society where the few lord over the many, but for their own good.

There are those within every institution, including the church world and the Republican Party, who collaborate with our modern woke communists. But the Party of Woke Communism today is the Democratic Party, even if most registered Democrats are, at worse, merely collaborators, but mostly just duped followers who know no better.

These woke communists go by many names, they seem to want to confuse everyone from seeing them as a whole. Their names include progressives, social justice warriors, social democrats, liberals (a misnomer to be sure), leftists, the new left, and on and on it goes. But all are cut from the same cloth: they want a communized society of undifferentiated and atomized individuals without faith or family led by a coterie of top-down authorities who know what is best for everybody.

We shouldn’t be fooled by their masks, their bogeyman fears, their utopian promises, or their dialectal approach whereby they hijack and use the very institutions (churches, the press, and corporations, as examples) their ideological forbears (Lenin and Mao) sought to destroy. Arrogance, hubris, and intolerance are the heart of the modern “cancel culture”, a new phrase for an old trick: demonize, marginalize, and criminalize your opponents but never debate them openly and honestly because your dark ideas are pure hell to anyone with half a brain who can see them for what they are.

Imagine a society of people who have no faith or family, who have no gender, and who are an undifferentiated mass whose only purpose is to live out their most basic animal desires and who feel no personal responsibility for their well-being or their actions. This is quite literally a species-ending hellscape being purposefully pushed by woke communists whose shot-callers (unbeknownst to most rank and file followers) simply want a monopoly on everything over everyone.

The good news is, it’s never going to get to that place. The bad news is, the journey of discovery, whereby a strong plurality of people truly resist and overcome this insanity, may get ugly for multiple generations.

But while we focus today on the threat of authoritarianism from “the left”, understand that authoritarianism takes many forms and, to some degree, as human beings with a sinful nature, it can arise within each of us. The religious zealot who thinks God needs help enforcing His laws, through the power of the state, is just as bad as the woke communist, but, let’s be real, those types truly have no institutional power to speak of in the broader society. At worse they may have outsized influence in backwater towns time has forgotten.

Regardless, the overarching war isn’t left and right per se, and it isn’t even just us against woke communist, that is just the primary battle of the moment as the new modern champion of authoritarianism is primarily the woke communist.

You may ask, “how can a billionaire robber baron be a woke communist?” The answer is simple: they believe their wealth and power allow them to have a hand in managing society for the common good. In short, they are full of themselves. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the quintessential woke communist front and, before their divorce, these two fancied themselves among the world’s most “woke” who, using their wealth and power, would usher in the next evolution of humanity and save the world from climate change.

The billionaire snob whose wealth and power is used to advance the woke communist way is no different than the well-fed, privileged party bigwigs who ran the Soviet Union. The methods change but the end is the same: society will be atomized and then communized and only the woke institutions controlled as a monopoly by the ruling class will have power.

We are in the atomization phase, using gender and new definitions of marriage and family to disconnect people from natural, organic bonds and make them individuals, all alone and powerless, a nameless cog within an undifferentiated mass.

The communization phase only follows the atomization phase. And it is precisely in this atomization phase that the fight is won or lost for the next few generations. If the atomization phase, and the destruction of faith and family, (which is a state of being wherein most children are raised by their own biological or adopted mother and father within the warm embrace of a strictly voluntary faith-based community) is left unchecked, the communization phase will be easy.

Real totalitarianism, which is the extreme and most violent form of authoritarianism, necessarily follows. But this can take years and will always be sincerely denied: indeed, the progenitors themselves may not even desire totalitarianism but they cannot see that this is the only possible outcome if their ideas prevail. For example, in 2021, President Biden may have been no authoritarian, or totalitarian, but he has been forced to bend the knee and at least give symbolic gifts to actually woke communists whose core ideas can only end in totalitarianism.

Unlike the woke communists, our vision of a society of spiritually sovereign equal human beings rooted in faith and family is strictly based on freewill participation. We do not need or want laws or coercion to compel people to live as we do. We believe that a free and pluralistic society of equals will tend to be a marketplace of ideas where the most fruitful ideas tend to attract the most people and resources.

If your definition of marriage and family or your faith (or absence of faith) differs but you agree that we have the inherent spiritual sovereignty and agency to form any bonds or freewill participatory associations we choose, then we can easily get along as friends and allies. A free and pluralistic society of equals can sustain many versions and definitions of faith and family and the marketplace of ideas will organically sort the best and worst ideas.

This begins to touch on our concept of “nationhood” as a spiritual union, purely based on freewill participatory association, of equals who have a shared spiritually-centered social, cultural, and economic value system and goals both for the individual’s profit and the common good of the whole. Even if your definition of nationhood differs, our desire isn’t to make you follow our concept of nationhood (as a spiritual construct) but to prevent others from stopping us from doing so.

Our vision isn’t political. Our chief political aim is the devolution of political, fiscal, cultural, monetary, economic and even magisterial authority back from the concentrated center and top of society to the individuals in their marriages, families, extended families, freewill participatory associations, faith or philosophy based communities, and their locales.

The process of devolution of centralized and top-down power and the deepest manifestation of freedom for individuals within the loving embrace of faith and family, is evolutionary as well. It is not all-political. In fact, its strongest foundation is the individual adopting this “ideology” (becoming a Freedomist) and embracing faith and family as their primary reality and the institutions to which they give their primary loyalty.

We begin with not merely confronting the atomization process as a means towards the communization of society but by intentionally rebuilding the very institutions under assault, faith and family in particular. It is not that we don’t want others to manifest faith and family as they believe it should be, this is never an authoritarian approach because that approach always undermines our entire vision for a free and pluralistic society of equals!

Our approach is to push back on all authoritarian responses by any entity that seems to use its wealth and power as a leverage to force or strongly manipulate people into doing what they think everyone should be doing. The question is not the legal rights of these “private” entities, it is a moral and ethical question of whether those with outsized economic or cultural power should abuse it in a way that violates the dignity and agency of other human beings.

Even though we do not sign on to political controls to weaken mega corporate powers who are trying to impose the woke communist way, this doesn’t mean we don’t seek to reduce their influence and control through other means, such as opting out and/or competition. We generally oppose political controls because they are not a good means and therefore cannot produce a good end.

As an example, Facebook was within its right to ban President Trump, but its ability to control a major portion of public discourse through its near monopoly power, in collusion with other platforms, is both unethical (but not illegal) and, more importantly, unwanted by us.

We don’t care why the platforms do what they do. We suspect their owners are either outright woke communists or collaborators who think they can appease the woke communists, whose radical, loud, and violent demands they fear. The net effect is that the power of the platforms, like every other major US institution, has been harnessed mostly to the benefit of the woke communists, even if that is not their intention.

An authoritarian response to the alleged wokeness of the platforms may boomerang upon us like the “Patriot Act” which was crafted to fight America’s enemies but which is now used against Americans whose only “crime” is not being a woke communist, one of their followers and/or beneficiaries, or at least a collaborator.

Authoritarianism is the true and ancient foe to freedomism, but today it takes the primary form within America of woke communism. This, not climate change or alleged white supremacy, which may indeed be threats, is the number one existential threat to America and especially to freedom within America.

When or if we defeat the woke communists in our era, there will be other forms of authoritarianism we must guard against, and, no doubt, some new manifestation of communism, the communization of society, will rear its disgusting mug and call itself glorious and beautiful!

The Freedom Building Culture of The New Civilization

Bill Collier June 26, 2021

By Willem IV- Is liberty drowning in the authoritarian barbarism of a woke cancel culture ruled by a corrupt ruling class who lord it over the atomized individuals in their teeming collective? How will we transcend the modern barbaric authoritarianism of the woke cancel culture so that we can live free and prosperous lives? The answer is found in history, in the emergence of a new civilization and in the intentional adoption of culture rooted in the ancient ways, with the lessons of history applied.

One can see lady liberty drowning or one can see her swimming away from the old civilization, toward the freedom-building culture of the new civilization, which is bound to emerge even as the old civilization declines. The bright sun is not a setting sun, it is the dawn of a new spiritual nation, predicated on the culture of freedom typified by a new civilization, and the emergence of that new civilization. Lady Liberty will LIVE on, past whatever this country and its people choose.

Arnold Toynbee, an historian and philosopher, studied the rise and fall and birthing process of civilizations and concluded that new civilizations were most always the result of efforts to restore an old, and dying, civilization to its original foundations and virtues. Oswald Spengler spoke of the birth and spring time of civilizations as a more virtuous period of spiritual and moral/ethical purity which devolved as culture gave way to compromises and the emergence of structures of a more and more authoritarian nature.

Both important thinkers were more focused on Western Civilization, Toynbee saw an opportunity to make Western Civilization the first to overcome the forces of decline and maintain itself in perpetuity, or at least far longer than any other civilization. Spengler saw the decline as inevitable but sought to make his own accommodation with its inevitable Caesarism and actually, at least for a time, made his peace with the Nazi regime as it was established in Germany.

We find Spengler’s accommodation with Nazism execrable and deeply troubling. It is the result of discerning perhaps the right problem but applying the wrong solution. Spengler concluded the West was entering a period of Caesarism, became fatalistic about it, and missed the solution, which was quite clear in his writings- reject the old civilizational paradigm in favor of a new paradigm and thereby escape the Caesars like Hitler and Mussolini or whoever else may emerge in the West’s march toward ruin! It was in his own description of the emergence of new civilization that he should have found a means of liberation.

Neither Spengler, as noted, nor Toynbee ever focused on the inevitable emergence of a new civilization or developed any deep thinking as to the nature or methods of its emergence in light of the aging of the West, despite the fact both men described the cycles of civilization in not substantially different ways.

Spengler sees a return to purity and the blood and soil, using biological language which some have, understandably, interpreted as simple racism. For Spengler, however, one may also see in his dense writing style a way of interpreting his biological concepts on a more spiritual and ideational basis as opposed to a biologically defined racial basis. Even if this was not his intent, when understood on a spiritual and ideational basis, his concept of the emergence and development of “races” as nations of people not defined by biological interpretations of race, can be useful for understanding how nations, cultures, and whole civilizations emerge, rise, and decline.

As for Toynbee, his description of “rout and rally”, in terms of both the emergence of a new culture and the decline of powers and civilizations, informed his thinking and adds to our understanding of civilization in its grand cycles. We can also find inspiration in his idea about the emergence of a new civilization centered on the withdrawal from the mainstream, as we would describe it today, of a minority or even a plurality of the populace on the basis of a rejection of the social and moral decay and out of a desire to resurrect the ancient ways, founded on moral and spiritual purity.

These two thinkers, and others like them, all seemed more or less to concur that the birth and early days of a new civilization were typified by moral and spiritual simplicity and purity and were presaged by a body of people who withdrew, emotionally and even physically as much as they could, from the structures of the dying civilization to restore what they saw as the foundations of that civilization.

It is not true that EVERY civilization had this “restorative genesis”, in other words that they were all attempts to restore the spiritual and moral purity of the old civilizations out of which they emerged. As an example, Western Civilization, it was argued, was an attempt to restore the moral and spiritual purity of the Roman civilization, or Classical Civilization, depending on whether one counts the Greek verses Roman civilizations as one or two civilizations.

Western Civilization is not merely a successor civilization to the Romans, it was immediately preceded by the Germanic Civilization, which had invaded the Western Roman Empire. Western Civilization was in fact largely inspired in its early days, around 700 to 800 AD, by a desire to restore the Roman Civilization, but its actual people, for the most part, were drawn mostly from the then dying Germanic Civilization, and in no small part some desire to restore the primitive simplicity of the more egalitarian German tribal system was also inspirational.

Nonetheless, the same principle applies to Western Civilization: it did emerge out of a desire to restore the purity of the previous civilizations which occupied what became its larger heartland, the heartlands of Western Rome and the Germanic tribes.

The development of an atomized lifestyle, sexual experimentation, lower birth rates, the decline of the nuclear family and marriage between a man and a woman who mostly raise their own (or their adopted) children, and the confusion of gender and gender roles are all prevalent traits of a dying civilization. In 1918, for instance, Spengler predicted that the widespread use of abortion and birth control and the decreased desire to have and raise children would typify Western culture within the next hundred years on its path to destruction.

Atomization means the individual has become mostly an isolated part of a massively centralized collective whole, disconnected from anything but mass-scale structures that dominate their life because their support and sustenance can only be found in these mass structures. The destruction of institutions such as marriage, children being raised by a mother and father figure in their own home, the nuclear family, the extended family, and close-knit, almost tribal, village-like communities with similar extended families as well as religious structures that are more local and familial, are all hallmarks of the decline of a civilization.

Freedom is a casualty of such decay and those who profess that “the family unit has evolved into a multiplicity of forms and functions” are mostly only extoling barbaric social norms as progress and destroying the very foundation of a free and prosperous society. Ruination is the final result, unless this ideology is not stopped and those who adhere to it do not lose power and influence in your culture-bearing institutions.

Whereas in a new civilization during its glorious springtime, the individual is connected to and depends upon very local structures which they can readily influence and participate in, the atomized individual in a dying civilization is isolated from local structures, doesn’t even know their neighbors, and must depend upon extra-local meta-scale structures over which they have no influence. Never again, after the springtime of a civilization, will the individual be more free as a human being, relative to any other period in their civilization’s development. regardless of their so-called political rights.

The assault upon localized, familial, and religious structures which connect people deeply on a personal basis is not always accidental: the communists engaged in this kind of wanton cultural destruction as a means of ensuring loyalty to the state. A localist interpersonal structure mitigates any need for dependence upon a state and, thus, is a source of competition for loyalty.

But whether this development is intentional, as with the communists, or accidental, as a result of general cultural decay, the moral and ethical foundation of civilization is always the hallmark of a dying civilization and may in fact be its cause. The primary loss for the individual is a loos of freedom, which is usually followed be increasing material privation.

Put another way, the moral and ethical practices we might consider socially conservative, such as sexual purity and marital fidelity, and preference for familial units that tend to promote fatherhood and motherhood, are essential to any localized familial structures. If this moral foundation is exchanged for indulgence and depravity, local interpersonal connection based on trust alone cannot be sustained. What we must also realize is that freedom itself is not possible where these strong localized interpersonal structures, founded on marriage the family, do not exist. In their absence, authoritarianism always rises. In their presence, freedom rises.

Not being able to trust a person’s fidelity in something like marriage, or not being able to experience the unique nurturing embrace that being raised by a mother and father figure provide, are all destructive to localized interpersonal bonds. Sexual “liberation” may be physically pleasurable, but it spells the end of civilization and always presages the emergence of anther characteristic of a dying civilization, both universalism and Caesarism. Being able to have and form such connections and communities through freewill association is itself a condition of freedom.

Universalism is a form of imperialism in which national peoples and families are subordinated to a universal state of grand scale which desires, at its core, the domination of its entire known world. Not all empires are or were meant to be universal states, but universal states tend to become centralized empires with little tolerance for any local autonomy.

The early Roman Empire was a largely decentralized empire that encouraged local autonomy in almost every arena, but as its moral and ethical foundation declined, as families were decimated by depravity, it became more and more centralized. The infusion of “Christianity’, after Constantine, may have reversed this trend if it had occurred 100 years earlier, but the rot was not reversible and the enemies of the Western empire were too large to prevent the collapse. But in the East, whose capital was named after the first Emperor who declared himself a Christian, actually evolved into its own new civilization, the Byzantine, which lasted some 1000 years.

Perhaps the cultural depravity in the East wasn’t as far advanced as it had been in the West, but what is most interesting is that while the Western part of the empire fell and its civilization collapsed under the onslaught of a Christianized Germanic civilization, in the East, the empire evolved and made a peaceful transition from the old civilization founded on paganism to a new civilization founded on Christianity but whose sociocultural norms reflected the ancient purity of the Roman and Greek civilization.

The culture of the new civilization will tend to resemble the sociocultural norms, the moral, ethical, and spiritual simplicity and purity, of the civilization or civilizations which preceded it. In the case of what we see as a new civilization, emerging from people and communities distributed all over the world and gathered initially online, we see the roots in not one but four civilizations, each of whose core ideal becomes the basis of four core ideals.

The Western Civilization gives us Unity in diversity, the Germanic gives us Popular sovereignty, the Classical (and Byzantine) gives us Democratic equality, and the Hebrew or Meddle Eastern gives us Rule of law. In the balanced application of these ideals, and if they are understood with a Judeo-Christian worldview as our perspective, we find a new sociocultural foundation that will restore the localized familial and interpersonal structures that remove dependence upon meta-scale mass structures of hierarchical control.

Unity in diversity is often expressed as individualism. Popular sovereignty is often expressed as loyalty. Democratic equality is often expressed as justice. And Rule of law is often expressed as righteousness. But these ideals are bigger than such simple terms.

Individualism without a unity based on shared virtues is hedonism. Loyalty without respect for both the sovereignty of individuals and their ability to freely associate is feudalism. Justice without the consent of the people (demos) and without equal application becomes mob rule. Righteousness without deference to the actual laws of cause and effect and the consent of those under such laws, and for the benefit of all, becomes hierarchicalism

Hedonism, feudalism, mob rule, and hierarchicalism all become authoritarian and form the basis of universal states that reduce the individual to a mere commodity to be used and exploited by an immoral, corrupt ruling class.

The new civilization we envision emerging in the hearts of individuals and nation of people will have all four core ideals as its basis. Their balanced application, using a Judeo-Christian interpretation of their meaning, is manifested primarily in localized familial interpersonal structures primarily, and only secondarily through larger structures of which these localized structures are the core constituent entities.

The nuclear family wherein most all children are raised by their own biological or adopted mother and family and which is connected in a mutually-sustaining bond with a larger extended family and familial village-type community become the typical expression of the culture of the new civilization. The purity and simplicity of human society and culture based on the simple fact of our biology, wherein a man and woman mate to give birth to children and then raise them together, is the restorative agency through which the new civilization emerges an then thrives.

This does not mean every marriage MUST result in children, but it means that, for the culture of the new civilization, marriage itself, whether it not the couple can reproduce, is modeled in the norm that most all children are either raised by their own biological parents or adopted by a mother and father who treat them as their own biological children.

Children being raised by their own biological parents, or at least by parents who treat them as their own biological children, is the essence of the simplest and purest form of human culture. Cultures that lack this tend to be barbaric and savage tribes or advanced and dying civilizations. As much as the cultural leaders of Western Civilization today treat their refutation of this norm as something bad and ‘backwards”, it is their cultural norms that are archaic and backwards and that reflect a precultural barbarism.

Arguments about whether people have a right, in a political or legal sense, to step outside of this norm are largely irrelevant because if the underlying culture is morally backwards no laws or prohibitions will change how people behave and live, What is more, those who embrace a morally advanced sociocultural norm rooted in children being raised by father and mother in a loving and nurturing home do not need any laws or policies to encourage them to connect in such a manner with others or to form localized interpersonal structures.

The problem is that the authoritarianism of a declining civilization with its bent toward universalism and Caesarism will tend to view a return to such localized interpersonal structures, based on a more advanced sociocultural norm suited to human progress, demands that these alternatives to its influence and control must be proscribed. One either embraces the new barbarism, which is sold as progress when in fact it is archaic savagery, or one faces proscription in some form.

It is not that the adherents of the more advanced sociocultural moral ethic are determined to proscribe anyone else who choose alternative ways to live, it is that the barbarian caesarists cannot abide even the vocalization of any claims that the more advanced sociocultural norms are best, and nor can they abide any criticism.

Even if the more advanced cultural adherents positively refused in any way to force anyone into their way of life, it would not be enough for the barbarians. The people seeking the restoration of the lost advanced cultural norms, rooted in this familial ethic and in localized interpersonal structures, find that they must essentially withdraw from dependence upon the meta-structures which consider disavowal of the advanced cultural norm as a basis of acceptability.

Independency in material needs is the only way for the national peoples of the new civilization to survive and make it to the point where the new civilization emerges. From this perspective then, we see that the culture of the new civilization is not only marked by familial and localized interpersonal structures, with children raised by a mother and father in a loving home within the maternal enclosure of a familial community. The culture of the new civilization is also marked by the material independency of its individuals, their nuclear families, and their localized interpersonal and familial structures.

This material independency is not merely an adherence to an idea in an ideological basis. It is a simple necessity because the condition of reward and demand of participation from the meta-scale structures of a dying civilization is always the disavowal of the advanced sociocultural norm and the embracing and participation in the barbaric sociocultural norm that presents itself as “progressive.”

Whoever does not embrace and participate in the barbaric sociocultural norm is materially punished by the meta structures of the dying civilization, therefore we always witness in the conception phase of a new civilization a withdrawal from material dependency and an intentional creation of material independency by adherents of a new civilization. All the things we may point to as signs of spiritual and moral decline which lead to civilizational collapse, the barbaric caesarist ruling class of the old civilization present as modern advancement or progress. The advanced culture is deemed archaic and backward and there are claims society is evolving and the old norms are no longer necessary or useful to human civilization.

All of this is terribly easy to predict because it repeats so often, albeit in many ways and on different terms, throughout the course of the larger human civilization which is tends of thousands of years old.

The question we may ask is, given the modern technological means of tracking and controlling people and the centralized economic structures, can a plurality of people peacefully withdraw from dependency and adopt material independency without earning the forceful rebuke of the existing ruling class?

This is where the concept of “gaps for freedom” becomes so critical. Gaps for freedom are legal and technological means by which individuals, small groups, and even larger scale structures can escape the scrutiny and/or the interference of the ruling class and their systems of influence and control.

Using legal structures like fraternal benefit societies, mutual benefit corporations, credit unions, land trusts, mutual assurance funds and non-governmental organization, adherents of the new civilization can create new structures which combine these exiting legal structures to stake out a more independent life out of the reach of the ruling class. What is more important in using these legal structures is that if the ruling class removed them as options they would incur more and more dissent as more and more people are materially harmed by their edicts. Additionally, the ruling class need and use these legal structures and doing away with them or arbitrarily limiting their use on ideological grounds would expose the naked authoritarianism and hasten a societal uprising against them.

The culture of this new civilization will be materially supported through a plethora of legal gaps for freedom which are combined in new ways to build what are essentially new structures. The new structures will resemble in form and spirit the lost ancient structures which typified the old civilization in its springtime.

The physical gaps for freedom come in the form of actual real estate, property, alternative forms of trade (trade scrips, local currency, or even cryptocurrency), new architectural designs to support multi-family extended household groups and revived and larger nuclear families, local food and energy production, and even physical safety and preparedness supplies (or structures) shared by small groups and networks of such groups.

The adoption of the new culture, based on the advanced culture that typifies of strong nuclear family connected to a cohesive familial community, a personal choice that begins to connect the people from whose brows and blood sweat and tears the new civilization will emerge.

This is not a mere re-creation of the old culture. In America, this isn’t the mere re-creation of the America of the 18^th or 19^th centuries, an America that in some ways was less advanced in our understanding of human dignity and human rights than we are now and that was technologically a very different place than anything we could or would want to build today. Going back to the start of this essay, the new civilization often emerges because some people rebel against the barbarism of a culture that claims it is progress and desire to restore the moral and spiritual purity which they imagine was the foundation of their existing, and dying, civilization.

We use the four core ideals described in the previous four civilization out of which the new civilization will emerge as the name of this new civilization and its core ideology and philosophy, “the Upadarian” civilization and ideology. The new civilization will embrace a more advanced culture, rooted in the same elements of all advanced cultures, such as parenthood, children being raised by a mother and father, and localized interpersonal structures. The present devolution of culture, under the banner of progressivism, which is barbarism in a thin disguise, will lead to sociocultural, socioeconomic, and eventually political collapse in the coming decades. The attempt to halt the downfall through raw, dictatorial force, in the name of keeping the ruling class alive and at the top at all costs, will ultimately fail.

The question is, as with the Roman Empire, will the new civilization be allowed to develop peacefully, or will it emerge as through the fires of ruin and collapse? Will all or only part of America be more like Byzantium, or will it fall to barbaric hordes as in the West?

A survey of the details of how Byzantium emerged versus how the Western empire fell, may reveal that the number of people who had already more or less adopted the cultural norms of the new civilization was simply greater in the East than the West and that the new religion, Christianity, had stronger and deeper connections and institutions than in the West. We can certainly say of the Byzantine Civilization, that while it too embodied the Democratic equality ideal of Classical civilization, it also found roots in the Rule of law of the Hebrew or Middle Eastern civilization. Ge Basically, this means the Byzantine Civilization had a deep and broad sociocultural foundation that was weaker in the West.

What this means for us today is that if we intend to see our country emerge in freedom from the Caesarism of Westen Civilization, more and more people must CHOOSE the advanced cultural norms of the new civilization, just as they did in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, thanks to a global communications system, the internet, global trade, and the relative ease of international travel, adherents of the new civilization can connect for mutual support outside the borders of the United States of America and can even physically remove themselves to places that accept them if the need arises.

The culture of the new civilization is the antithesis of the woke cancel culture of modern “progressive” barbarism, built on a combination of atomization of individuals, hedonism, and caesaristic hierarchies of control. These parrots of the new barbarism imagine they are the next evolution and the only legitimacy one can find comes through the approval and support of their structures and sociocultural backwardness which they present as inevitability and progress.

The culture of the new civilization will more or less restore and rebuild marriage, family, and familial local interpersonal structures, but not as a replica of the culture of our civilization from its founding or even 200 or 300 years ago. In spirit, this will be very much more like the ancient ways, but in practice and methods, and even in structures and how we define nationality or how men and women interact, it will offer some modern, and necessary, innovations.

The notions women are less than men or any notion that any human is “lesser than” based on their ancestry or skin color, will not be revived. These notions represented a flaw in our ancient culture and may have contributed to the emergence of modern barbarism, which was, in part, a rebellion against these injustices.

Modern barbarism has just rejected the flaw of ancient culture, which was more advanced than our own because it at least promoted familial bonds over dependency on the state. Modern barbarism has rejected the most advanced elements of ancient culture; marriage, parenthood, family, extended family, local autonomy, and nationhood as a spiritually based sociocultural construct.

The culture of the new civilization will not resemble our atomized, hedonistic, and hierarchically controlled culture, but even if in spirit it has strong roots in our ancient foundations and the ancient culture, it will not be a mere replication of that either. The culture of the new civilization will go beyond the past but will reject the barbarism of the present. The culture of the new civilization, experienced within and through modern gaps for freedom, will itself promote and advance freedom in new ways, far beyond anything achieved in the past. Through the adoption of this culture and way of life, you will be able to personally, and within your own family and community, transcend and overcome the weak woke cancel culture barbarism being imposed by a corrupt ruling class.

Once Again We Must DEFEAT A War On Freedom

Bill Collier June 16, 2021

We must make a fresh determination in our hearts, as did the men and women in World War Two, to fight to defend freedom! We do this by defending and advancing what makes America good and defeating the ongoing war on America’s goodness. This is a war on freedom by today’s version of the Axis Powers, the woke communists!

Freedom is rooted in goodness.

Take away goodness and freedom is reduced to libertine license and animalistic savagery. America’s freedom stands on our goodness. This is why we say that a war on America’s goodness as the line of attack against freedom by the new Axis of woke communists!

Let’s begin by asking, “What makes America good?”

It’s not what you think, and if you get this right you understand what is truly at stake is the very existing of our country. If you get this wrong you become distracted and fight meaningless battles that won’t change the outcome of this war on freedom.

Trump’s slogan remains “Make America Great Again”, MAGA. But the word “great” implies our military power, wealth, or economic clout and standing compared to the world. On the contrary, when we focus on how America is GOOD we get a different feeling in two ways.

First, we aren’t trying to make America good, it is good. Second, we aren’t necessarily trying to compare America to other countries or imply that only we can be good.

So many people support Trump because, whatever else is said about him, they deeply believe he loves America as America, not as some weird globalized hybrid devoid of our heritage. Whatever the truth behind the myth, the people following Trump are generally drawn to him because they inwardly feel that which is the essence of America is under siege.

The war on America’s goodess, both in denying it is a real thing and in attacking its historical moral orthodoxy, is all-too common among the new Axis of “woke communists”, right and left, who occupy places of power in both political parties and every major institution.

America is not good because we have wealth or military might, we are not good because we are great compared to other countries. America is also not good because we unhypoctritically adhere our stated ideals and values across the board. These things are not the source of our goodness.

America is good because the foundational ideals create an arc of history toward a free and pluralistic society. This is a vision predicated on God’s standards of righteousness and justice.

America fulfilled in its ideals is a society made up of spiritually sovereign human beings created in the image of God. It may thay these ideals, as some rightfully explain, are violated in practice. But they are real and they are good. The sociocultural and spiritual heritage, constitution (as in our spiritual constitution), and true manifest destiny of America as a free and pluralistic society of equals is what makes America good.

If America chooses to betray and turn its back on its innate goodness, out of some deconstructionist pique about how we haven’t yet fulfilled our ideals and our potential, then America will not only cease to be great, it will cease to be America!

America is great because America is good and if America ceases to be good, it ceases to be great. This was the sentiment of Alexis de Tocqueville and many of America’s foundational thinkers and builders. Even Thomas Jerfferson, despite hypocritically owning slaves, could not deny that all men, as in all HUMANS, are created equal. The sentiment and truth may have escaped him in practice, but its essential veracity cannot be denied and should never be denied.

Take the notion of manifest destiny. It was warped into an imperialistic lust for lands and colonies in the late 19th century. But, setting aside such a notion, which doesn’t fit our spiritual constitution, the idea of a manifest destiny for individuals or for this country is a sound idea.

America’s manifest destiny isn’t land or power, as was presented in the late 19th century, it is the fulfillment of our goodness as a free and pluralistic society of equals. And to fulfill that manifest destiny we must ever resort to and use America’s goodness as our guide!

This goodness is found in our virtues and ideals, our values and our convictions. It is a benchmark and guide for everything from personal conduct and free enterprise to policy and law.

There are those who are at war with America’s goodness because, at the core, they are waging war on freedom itself. Some call them woke communists, as in a new form of communism which employs private and public institutions and uses the woke cancel culture to suppress opposition. Their favorite tactic is deconstruction.

Deconstruction involves inflating every sin, using guilt by association in the extreme, ignoring anything good about America, and removing the ancient landmarks of right and wrong. Its insidious purpose is to pave the way for an essentially unjust system of top-down and centralized micromanagement of your life. The goal is totalitarianism of some kind.

America’s goodness is more than a foundation for our alleged greatness. Who cares how great we are if we are not good. A great society that isn’t good is only beneficial for the few at the expense of the many. In utilizing our virtues and moral foundations to guide behavioral expectations, public life, and law and in being led by the essentials of our goodness, we acheive goodness that benefits all, excluding none! Goodness is its own reward, it is not just something that gets us something else.

Goodness will generate some form of greatness, but this is the effect, not a goal. Goodness generates freedom and prosperity, it creates a just society that is also pluralistic, and it establishes prosperity as the norm. Don’t let a anyone con you into thinking our goodness isn’t real, isn’t worth defending, and it’s essential to our survival as a free country.

The battle to save and then advance America’s goodness to new heights of fulfillment is a spiritual and then sociocultural battle as well as, albeit secondarily, an economic and then a political battle. The aim is to both defeat the combined agents of a new form of woke communism and to impart and promote America’s goodness as something practiced by individuals and their free associations as well as in our public life, policy, and laws.

Our aim should not merely be to hold back a further advance of the Axis of woke communists and their allies, both right and left. Our aim must be to expose, confront, and defeat efforts by the woke communists to wage war on America’s goodness.

As we Freedomists see it, America’s true manifest destiny, from the perspective of our Judeo-Christian roots, is threefold:

1. to become a decentralized empire of freedom (through virtue, liberty, and independence) with maximum individual and local empowerment according to God’s standards of righteousness and justice

2. to become the cradle of a new civilization founded on shared values and convictions based on our Judeo-Christian roots and worldview and our core ideals

3. to fulfill our spiritual constitution based on a balanced application and Judeo-Christian interpretation of the four core ideals of the new civilization, namely Unity in diversity, Popular sovereignty, Democratic equality, and Rule of law

In such a free and pluralistic society even those whose personal beliefs are neither Jewish nor Christian find a place of liberty and justice that accepts and loves them on the basis of our shared human dignity. But, we assert, without a Judeo-Christian worldview, America’s goodness is untenable and will disappear and so too will America.

Though individuals should be free to choose, it does not stand to reason that things like the accepted sociocultural norms, public life, policy, or law should be turned against those who adore and seek to emulate and propagate America’s goodness. Indeed, we also assert, America’s goodness founded on our Judeo-Christian worldview, should be favored, even though tolerance for those who beliefs and practices differ is also essential to our goodness. In other words, while law should favor the familial unit based on our Judeo-Christian moral foundations, it doesn’t have to compel all to follow such a view of family.

The fact the essence of America’s goodness, which has deep roots in marriage and the family according to thousands of years of historic Christian and Jewish orthodoxy, is being positively demonized by every major institution, public and private, is alarming. This is just one example of the woke communist war on America’s goodness. The net effect is not the advancement of the rights of those whose views on such matters are outside this historic orthodoxy, but, rather, it is the reducing of the rights of the majority to both practice their lifestyle in peace AND promote and propagate it as the BEST approach to marriage and family.

The war to defeat the woke communists and their war on America’s goodness is essentially spiritual and sociocultural, the economic and civic aspects of the the fight being important but not core. We must create and build sociocultural bonds and associations rooted in our spiritual heritage, which is the Judeo-Christian moral orthodoxy, without apology or compromise and on the basis of freewill participation.

We support any and all efforts by people to form freewill participatory associations on any basis, provided the essentials of liberty as defined by the original spirit and intent of the US Bill of Rights are respected. But our focus and aim is on building such freewill participatory association on the basis of what we see as the foundation of America’s goodness: our historic Judeo-Christian moral and ethical orthodoxy which to us remains relevant both to our present needs and future advancement.

America’s goodness is under assault by unscrupulous purveyors of a woke communism that employs public and private institutions to micromanage your life. They, the woke communists, want to deconstruct our goodness on frivolous grounds, without of course explaining that their alternative is far, far, worse than anything our country has allegedly done in violating our standards of goodness.

No country, including ours, will perfectly fulfill its core goodness, if it has such a core, for everyone, all the time. But the woke communists desire to use the excuse of our past and present failures to live up to our goodness as an indictment of our goodness so that, instead of moving toward fulfilling our goodness for more and more people most all the time, we fulfill it less and less for almost all the people, almost all the time.

Defeating the Axis in World War Two took a massive mobilization. Defeating the Axis of woke communists today will require a similar mobilization of citizen activists who soar about the lies and build freedom together!

The relentless assault on America’s goodness by the Axis of woke communism is regressive and barbaric. Their alternative, which they refuse to candidly admit, is an atomized society of nameless, undifferentiated cogs in their machine who are told exactly how to think and act on pain of being canceled right out of existence. Such a hellscape version of tomorrowland for this country would spell the literal end of America.

Without forcing anyone to fit into our mold, but asserting our own shared rights of self-preservation and self-determination, our goal is to promote and impart America’s goodness and to work to see our true and deeper manifest destiny as a free and pluralistic society of equals become more and more fulfilled in our lives, associations, community, and our whole country.

In World War Two, our brave men and women didn’t fight the Axis powers only to watch America fall prey to the new Axis of a woke communist authoritarianism, they fought to defend and advance America’s goodness! We Freedomists will stand in that noble tradition.

Anyone who vilifies us or smears us over this or who tries to make our lives harder simply because they cannot abide us being happy as we define happiness is a totalitarian and a morally backwards, barbaric human being. Our right to be and pursue as well as proclaim and seek legal protection for a life lived by the guidance of America’s goodness should never be interfered with by any person or by any public or private entity.

Efforts to cancel people or punish people because they pursue America’s goodness are unacceptable and intolerable. Together as Freedomists who love America, we will expose the war on America’s goodness, we will defeat the war on freedom, we will peacefully overthrow the woke communists, and we will strive to find practical ways to live out our values and convictions in peace.

The Axis of woke communists and their allies in every major US institution may seem formidable and mighty, like Britain facing the Axis in June of 1940, but we will awaken the sleeping giant and then the tide on these barbarous hordes!

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Photos by the author, Bill Collier

America Still Has Slaves

Bill Collier May 15, 2021

By Bill Collier- We have slavery in America today.

Everyone in prison for crimes they didn’t commit or that don’t warrant indentured servitude as a punishment is being enslaved unjustly. Everyone in jail or prison for doing real and direct harm to others is an indentured servant, because their servitude is justified.

Indentured servitude in prison, corporal punishment, restitution, suspension of status or privileges, suspension of rights, and even execution are all justifed punishments that absolve the land of the guilt of evildoers. To place a person in prison when it not justified is to enslave them, which is injustice.

The only way to absolve the land of the guilt of evildoers is to punish them in proportion to their crime, otherwise the land bears the guilt of all evildoers who knowingly go unpunished by the magistrate. We enforce law based, ideally, on our best understanding of God’s righteous and just standards for the benefit of all and we punish evildoers so that the land does not bear their guilt.

To punish an evildoer in a disproportionate way or to punish the innocent, or even to write laws that outlaw otherwise morally and ethically defensible acts that do no harm nor bring shame to the land, also brings guilt to the whole land. The only way to expiate this guilt so that the whole land does not suffer the consequences is to punish those who did these evil deeds.

To be clear, treating someone as an evildoer who has made a mistake and deserves correction, like a first time DUI where nobody was harmed, is itself unjust and the guilt of allowing that to happen is born on the land and, therefore, brings negative consequences to all. When you do this you have made them a slave.

People who deserve prison should be made indentured servants to the community they violated to expiate their offenses, and then, unless they have committed henious crimes deserving of death, given a path to restoration. But indenturing people to prison who do not deserve it makes them chattel slaves, and this is a crime against God’s standards righteousness and just standards for the nations!

Our country literally enslaves millions of people, a disproportionate number whom are black or minorities, because their imprisonment is without justification, as in their offenses do not merit enslavement as a punishment. There are many other punishments short of indentured servitude in prison that would suffice and, therefore, to go beyond these things is injustice, it is slavery!