I’ve always been interested in history. History is the foundational root of everything we are aware of in the present. How agriculture and animal husbandry evolved. How medicine came to be practiced. How law was established. How education was transmitted and conveyed. How military tactics, operations, and strategy came to be known. How the empirical scientific method grew out of superstition and witchcraft.
In the late 1970s, I remember watching a television program created, written, and presented by science historian James Burke called Connections. The showdemonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology. Everything we enjoy today—civil rights, modern conveniences, medical breakthroughs, advances in transportation—is a result of historical precedent. To fail to understand how important history is, to fail to appreciate how an individual, a country, a culture, or a civilization came to be in the present day, is to be blinded by ignorance that doom an individual to a lifetime of disconnected nihilism and civilization to another Dark Age.
Why has the American republic succeeded where other attempts at republican government throughout the world have failed? Our neighbor to the north, Canada, remains a commonwealth of the United Kingdom. They do not have a Bill of Rights because they never had a War of Independence. Canadians are still subjects of the Queen. Our neighbor to the south, Mexico, had a War of Independence from their own imperial motherland, Spain. And yet the history of Mexico since its independence from Spain has been a chain of petty dictators, revolution, corruption – and today, a third of the country is ruled by transnational cartels.
Simon Bolivar attempted to replicate the success of George Washington. He failed. Thomas Paine believed the French Revolution would have the same results as the American Revolution. Thomas Paine was wrong. Potential immigrants from all over the world desire to immigrate to the United States of America. Why the United States? Why not other countries? What makes the United States work?
Russell Kirk wrote in The Roots of American Order that the success of the United States came from the influence of four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. All of the thought, philosophy, and ideas of those cities was distilled in the city of Philadelphia.
The Hebrews. The Christians. The Hellenic Greeks. The Ancient Romans. And the Anglo-Saxons. Christendom – the religion of The West. Greece – the cradle of Western Civilization. The Roman Republic – whose architecture, science, military organization, and system of education continue to influence our culture today. And Anglo-Saxon common law. This is what we have inherited.
How does an entire country lose its freedom? One of the first tactics of any tyrannical system is to remove the heritage, legacy, and cultural touchstones of a people to their ancestral past. Chairman Mao called it “getting rid of the Four Olds.” The Jacobins of the French Revolution disposed of the old Gregorian calendar and proclaimed Year One. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia – while massacring millions of their fellow Cambodians – proclaimed Year Zero.
In his final speech as President of the United States, Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is only one generation away from extinction.”
Without knowing who we are as Americans, we cannot defend ourselves from the forces who seek to strip our distinctive cultural identity away; we cannot defend ourselves from the orchestrated efforts which seek to shame us into believing America is nothing more than a nation of greed, brutality, and racism. We cannot prevent the methodical and systematic endeavors to remove our natural rights which have been secured by a Constitution which is only as good as the people who have the integrity to uphold it.
Consequently, this column will endeavor to defend our history, our culture, our traditions, and our shared norms from the cultural Marxists seeking to overthrow, erase, and fundamentally change the United States of America. I hope to impart some of the knowledge I have gained and learn more from reader feedback as we work together to reclaim the glorious legacy we have all inherited as American citizens!
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