SARTRE
Breaking All the Rules
Apirl 19, 2016
Lest we forget, this country was forged out of a concerted desire to free the shackles of the British Empire, so that colonies could chart their own course for individual state governments. If only people understood this historic fact. Since so few are familiar with the actual cornerstones of the America Revolution and the latest generations know even less, the indoctrination from government schools has stripped out the quest for knowledge of what made America different. Consider a virtual reality time travel back two hundred and forty-one years to the start of the most important revolution of all times.
The Sons of Liberty were not traitors, they were freedom fighters. The Tory loyalists were not simply Englishmen, they were Monarchists committed to the British Empire. The minutemen at the Old North Bridge in Concord viewed themselves as Englishmen, but knew that their mother land lost sight of respecting their subjects inalienable rights of heritage, who populated the new world.
Stand abreast with the Lexington Massachusetts farmers as the echo of the first crack of defiance was heard throughout the globe. The significance of the “Shot Heard Round the World” is nicely summed up by Chuck Baldwin. He submits that these “two elements of American history are lost to the vast majority of historians today: 1) it was attempted gun confiscation by the British troops that ignited America’s War for Independence, and 2) it was a pastor and his flock that mostly comprised the “Minutemen” who fired the shots that started our great Revolution.”
The phrase itself originates in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord Hymn, 1837 and relates to the start of the American Revolutionary War:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard 'round the world.
Missing in the narrow vision of public awareness and worldly experience, the current culture totally fails to appreciate exactly what composed this revolution. Most of political discourse revolves around reforms of the basic institutions, evolutionary changes to the existing system, or incremental replacement of the present order.
In order to be “politically correct” or to succumb to threats from penal punishment, non violent alternatives are the only acceptable options suited for dialogue. Lost in this modern day docile compliance culture is that muskets, rifles, shot and powder proved to be the means of meeting military force with counter citizen weaponry.
Also, and much more important is the legacy that preachers of the Christian religion formed the spiritual and moral legitimacy for the revolution.
As part of this time journey back to the Green Dragon Tavern, engaging and plotting the methods and tactics of defiance would meet the likes of Samuel Adams, Dr. Joseph Warren and Paul Revere. The Committee of Correspondence expanded and communicated the loose unity that developed around the opposition to the continued despotism from the English Crown.
Investigating the true meaning of our national origin requires a serious honesty that admits the internal conflict, which has always existed among competing factions, continues to the present. In The Significance of the American Revolution, which presents two ways of viewing the nature of the conflict, and lays out the dilemma.
“The ideas of the Revolution have been most often depicted as a triumph of the social contract/natural rights theories of John Locke. Correct so far as it goes, this characterization passes too quickly over the continuing importance of Calvinist dissenting Protestantism, which from the Pilgrims and Puritans on had also stood for the ideals of the social contract and the self-governing community. Lockean intellectuals and the Protestant clergy were both important advocates of compatible strains of liberalism that had flourished in the British North American colonies.
Scholars have also argued that another persuasion contributed to the Revolution: "republicanism." Republicanism, they assert, did not deny the existence of natural rights but subordinated them to the belief that the maintenance of a free republic required a strong sense of communal responsibility and the cultivation of self-denying virtue among its leaders. The assertion of individual rights, even the pursuit of individual happiness, seemed egoistic by contrast. For a time republicanism threatened to displace natural rights as the major theme of the Revolution. Most historians today, however, concede that the distinction was much overdrawn. Most individuals who thought about such things in the 18th century envisioned the two ideas more as different sides of the same intellectual coin.”
A very different approach looks to explain the class distinctions that linger to this day, portrayed in Completing the America Revolution.
The Two American Revolutions
We've been taught to believe that there was only one American Revolution, a struggle to throw off the tyrannies of Great Britain. And relative to that revolution, we're conditioned to believe that the heroes were revolutionary patriots such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Sam Adams, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, the Sons of Liberty, and the Committees of Correspondence.
But in reality there were two American Revolutions:
Now if you were transported to colonial life in your time machine, what would you find?
What Was Colonial Life Really Like?
In Colonial America, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting much poorer. In 1687 in Boston, the top 1% owned about 25% of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1% owned 44%. In those same years, the poor--those who owned no property--represented 14% in 1687 and 29% in 1770.
In the various colonies the wealthy merchant class introduced property qualifications for voting in order to disenfranchise the poor and protect their own privileges:
This class outlook for evaluating the nature of the American Revolution is not part of the usual curriculum for national assimilation into an endowment of fidelity towards the political system. However, with the popular explosion of collectivism, the vast population experiencing diminished economic opportunities looks to an all powerful government to provide their next meal.
Because of this adverse condition, the misguided FEDERALISTS peons rely on a central government for subsistence, while never gaining any actual political power. The essay, A Constitution Flawed from Inception explains how the American Revolution was betrayed by the Hamiltonian elites, because they simply wanted to mirror the British Empire at the expense of the minutemen, who fought the battles for a revolutionary Republic.
“Did the U.S. Constitution really break with the king and a constitutional parliament, or did it simply guarantee that a charade of popular franchise, would replace one form of legalism for another set of contrived judicatory rule? The structure for a central government was above all meant to exert a limited role and scope. Individual States would remain self-governing, with different functions and jurisdiction; within a larger union. An imaginative vision, but examine the reality.
As difficult as it is for traditional conservatives to admit, their sacred document could not craft an enlightened human nature. Those who seek to become instruments of governance only perpetuate the error of creating an office that leads to an imperial president and an omniscient judiciary. Even under a Jefferson presidency, MARBURY v. MADISON (1803), became a land mark case establishing the practice of judicial review by federal courts over acts of the other two branches of government. The dream died as the court appropriated the ultimate say. Brute force and deadly coercion gain dominance within the executive, and manifested its culmination with Lincoln’s war of Northern Aggression. So much for viable sovereignty embodied in individual will. The clash of cultures produced the authoritarianism of a central government, because the U.S. Constitution created a model that encouraged the empowerment of a presidency.”
Transportation back to 1775 allows understanding of the reasons for the battle against King George III. If you overstayed your welcome and lingered around for another twenty-eight years, you would witness the failure of the American Republic experiment.
Time never stands still. That resolute which reverberate at Lexington and Concord, no longer rings true. Emerson's poem may have made famous the mythos of Liberty or Death, but the fact of the matter, by the time he penned the verse the Federal government dismantled the essence and spirit of the revolt.
Today what is heard and seen across the globe is a tyrannical New World Order, controlled by globalist elites and technocratic Tories that are many times worse than the madness of King George III. The psychoses that created and maintain the American Empire have become the ultimate treachery and sell out of the principles of the American Revolution.
Travelling to the past is much more romantic than braving the universal oppression of the future. Reserving a ticket to ride the bull of this “reign of terror” imperium from a betrayed dream is no substitute for a nation based upon individual liberty.
SARTRE writes for Breaking All The Rules, where this article first appeared. Submitted by the author for publication here at Govern America.
