I append to this introduction a longish article by Professor Michel Chossudovsky, approximately 4,500 words in length. It is one of the most detailed "backstory" accounts of why and how the Ukraine conflict came about--detailing the nefarious actions and outrageous provocations of the Neoconservative-dominated US State Department, truly a "state-within-a-state," operating seemingly without any limits, constitutional or otherwise, with the object of imposing, either by force or by guile, American global hegemony on recalcitrant nations of the world.


Along with studies by Professor Richard Sakwa (Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, 2015), Ben Abelow (How the West Brought War to Ukraine, 2022), a recent full issue of Harper’s (“Why Are We in Ukraine?” by Benjamin Schwartz and Christopher Layne, June 2023), and other investigative works by Professor John Mearsheimer and Scott Ritter, Chossudovsky’s essay should be required reading for members of the US Congress and anyone seriously concerned about the increasingly perilous conflict in eastern Europe.

As with earlier situations, e.g., the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, etc., this history is one of continual (and largely disastrous) hegemonic efforts of the Neocon foreign policy elites who have guided our foreign policy for decades, to continue to advance their vision of a leftist democratic world, replete with every moral and political barbarism now afflicting the USA and much Western Europe. Thus, the US's intense pressure on the pliant Ukrainian regime to institute transgenderism and full "homosexual equity," both on and off the battlefield.

In all seriousness, we should ask: Is not such infectiously evil activity forced on countries around the world a kind outright subservience to a form of Satanism?

Of particular interest is a transcript of the full February 2014 conversation between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. That supposedly secret conversation was picked up accidentally by Estonian sources and then made public. IT HAS NEVER BEEN DENIED or refuted in any way...and it is revelatory in illustrating the imperious globalist vision regnant along the Potomac and in Bruxelles.

The article was apparently translated, but I have made some discrete edits so to make it more readable and fluent for English-speaking audiences. But I urge you to read it...and to reflect and consider the consequences of what I call "unending war for unobtainable peace," and in the process the destruction of billions of dollars of infrastructure, the cultural obliteration of entire countries, and the deaths of many thousands of civilians...indirectly traceable to the demonic policies of our Neocon elites.

Read on.

Introduction

This article addresses the implications of a controversial statement by NATO to the effect that the Ukraine War “didn’t start in 2022”, “The war started in 2014.” It’s a Bombshell: NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed (speaking on behalf of NATO) that the “war didn’t start in 2022”.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Jens Stoltenberg unequivocally confirmed that “the war started in 2014″. Jens Stoltenberg’s bold statement (which has barely been the object of media coverage) has opened up a Pandora’s Box, or best described “A Can of Worms” on behalf of the Atlantic Alliance. What he bears out is that the beginning of the Ukraine coincided with a U.S.-sponsored coup d’état, confirmed by Victoria’s Nuland‘s “F**k the EU” telephone conversation with U.S. Ambassador Pyatt in February 2014. (see below).

Part I of this article examines the legal implications of Stoltenberg’s statement on behalf of the Atlantic Alliance. Of crucial significance: Having stated that “the war started in 2014”, NATO can no longer claim that Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) of February 24, 2022 constitutes, from a legal standpoint, “an invasion”. Part I also addresses the issue of The Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC).

Parti II focuses on Stoltenberg’s twisted statement that Article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty could be invoked as means to declare war against Russia. “Article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty – its collective defence clause,” declares that an attack on one member state is “to be an attack against all NATO members.” Article 5 is NATO’s doctrine of Collective Self-Defense. “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”.

In regard to the invocation of Article V in relation to Russia, a justification or fake “pretext” was mentioned by Stoltenberg in his interview with the Washington Post.

Were Article V to be invoked, this would inevitably precipitate the World into a WWIII scenario, consisting of a war whereby all 30 member states of the Atlantic Alliance, most of which are members of the European Union would be involved

1. The Legality of Russia’s “Special Military Operation”

Inasmuch as the war had commenced and has been ongoing since 2014 as confirmed by Stoltenberg, Russia’s Special Military Operation cannot be categorized as an “illegal invasion” (under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter). The latter states that members of the UN shall refrain: “from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.…”

Inasmuch as the war started in 2014, Art 2(4) applies to both the Kiev regime and well as US-NATO which was behind the February 2014 illegal coup d’état.

What this implies is that from a legal standpoint, US-NATO on behalf and in coordination with the Kiev regime had initiated a de facto undeclared war against Luhansk and Donesk. From a legal standpoint, this was not “An Act of War against Russia”. Led by US-NATO, this was an “Act of War against Ukraine and the People of Ukraine”.

As we recall President Putin had defined the Special Military Operation (SMO) in support of the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The stated objective was to “demilitarise” and “denazify” Ukraine. Article 51 of the UN Charter which was referred to by President Putin in his February 24, 2022 speech confirms the following:

What Stoltenberg intimated in his interview with the WP (no doubt unwittingly) is that the Ukraine War was a US-NATO initiative, carried out in the immediate wake of the illegal US supported February 2014 EuroMaidan coup d’etat which was then conducive to the instatement of the regime in Kiev.

The New York Times described the EuroMaidan as “a flowering of democracy, a blow to authoritarianism and kleptocracy in the former Soviet space.” (After Initial Triumph, Ukraine’s Leaders Face Battle for Credibility, NYTimes.com, March 1, 2014, emphasis added)

The grim realities were otherwise. The forbidden truth was that US-NATO had engineered –through a carefully staged covert operation– the formation of a US-NATO proxy regime, which was conducive to the removal and brutal demise of the elected president Viktor Yanukovych.

The staged EuroMaidan Protest Movement initiated in November 2013 was led by the two Ukrainian Nazi parties, with Dmytro Yarosh, of the Right Sector (Pravy Sector) playing a key role as leader of the Brown Shirt Neo-Nazi paramilitary. He had called for disbanding the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party. The shootings of protesters by snipers were coordinated by Yarosh’s Brown Shirts and Andriy Parubiy leader of the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party.

Of significance there was a leaked telephone conversation (February 2014) between Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and European Union Commissioner Catherine Ashton, which confirmed that “the snipers who shot at protesters and police in Kiev were hired by Ukrainian opposition leaders [NeoNazis]”.

Leaked Conversation: Urmas Paet and Catherine Ashton:

Estonia Foreign Minister Urmas Paet tells Catherine Ashton the following (excerpts):

As outlined above, Andriy Parubiy played a key role in the EuroMaidan massacre. Andriy Parubiy is the co-founder together with Oleh Tyahnybok of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda). Parubiy was first appointed Secretary of the National Security and National Defense Committee (RNBOU) by the Kiev regime. (Рада національної безпеки і оборони України), a key position which overseas the Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces, Law Enforcement, National Security and Intelligence. He subsequently (2015-2019) became Vice-Chair and Chair of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s Parliament) shifting into the realm of international diplomacy on behalf of the regime.

In the course of his career, Parubiy developed numerous contacts in North America and Europe, and with members of the European Parliament. He was invited to Washington on several occasions, meeting up (already in 2015) with Sen. John McCain (chair) of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He was also invited to Ottawa, meeting up with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Parliament Hill in 2016.

Victoria Nuland, acting on behalf of the US State Department was directly involved in “suggesting” key appointments. While the Neo-Nazi leader Oleh Tyahnybok was not granted a cabinet position, members of the two neo-Nazi parties (namely Svoboda [Freedom Party] and The Right Sector [Pravy Sektor]) were granted key positions in the areas of Defense, National Security and Law Enforcement.

The Neo-Nazis also controlled the judicial process with the appointment of Oleh Makhnitsky of the Svoboda Party (on February 22, 2014) to the position of prosecutor-general. What kind of justice would prevail with a renowned Neo-Nazi in charge of the Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine?

The controversial conversations between Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Pyatt are recorded below. (See audio and transcript below, YouTube version (below). (Leaked Online on February 4, 2014, Exact Date of Conversation Unconfirmed, Three weeks prior to the demise of President Yanukovych on February 21-22, 2014)
Transcript of Conversation between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, on YouTube. Source of transcript: BBC.

**Warning: This transcript contains swearing**

There is ample evidence of collaboration between the Kiev regime and NATO member states, specifically in relation to the continuous flow of military aid as well the training and support provided to the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

NOTE: “In the aftermath of World War II, the National Socialist Party (the Nazi party) of Germany was considered a criminal organization and therefore banned. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946 likewise ruled that the Nazi Party was a criminal organization.”

Since 2014, Ukraine’s regime has been generously funded by several NATO member states. The Nazi Azov Battalion was from the outset integrated into Ukraine’s National Guard which is under the jurisdiction of Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Azov battalion has (2015) been trained by the U.S. Canada and the UK. “The US contingent of instructors includes 290 specialists.…” Britain has dispatched 75 military personnel responsible for training “in command procedures and tactical intelligence”. (Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2015). The training program was coupled with the influx of military equipment under a program of so-called “non-lethal” military aid. In turn, the Azov battalion –which is the object of military aid, has also been involved in the conduct of Summer Nazi training Camps for children and adolescents. [See: Ukraine’s “Neo-Nazi Summer Camp”. Military Training for Young Children, Para-military Recruits By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, July 08, 2023]

The Azov battalion’s Summer Camps are supported by US military aid channelled to the Ukraine National Guard via the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The MIA coordinates the “anti-terrorism operation” (ATO) in Donbass.

Civilian population (children) and civilian objects (schools, hospitals, residential areas) were the deliberate object of UAF and Azov Battalion attacks in blatant violation of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). In accordance with the LOAC, Moscow took the decision starting in February 2014 to come to the rescue of Donbass civilians including children. Visibly the president of the I.C.C. Piotr Hofmanski in accusing President Putin of “unlawful kidnapping of Ukrainian children” hasn’t the foggiest understanding of Article 48. of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). Is this an issue of incompetence? Or has Piotr Hofmanski been co-opted into endorsing crimes against humanity?

In derogation of The Law of Armed Conflict, US-NATO bears the responsibility for having endorsed the Neo-Nazi Azov battalion, which was involved in the conduct of atrocities against civilians.

Article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty constitutes NATO’s doctrine of Collective Self-Defense: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.…”
Article V was invoked in March 1999, based on a “fabricated pretext” to bomb and invade Yugoslavia. It was subsequently invoked on September 12, 2001 by the Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels as a justification to declare war on Afghanistan, on the grounds that an unnamed foreign power had attacked
America on September 11, 2001. In both cases (Yugoslavia and Afghanistan), “fabricated pretexts” were used to justify the invocation of Article V.

Stoltenberg’s reference to “undersea infrastructure” intimates that Russia was behind the sabotage of Nord Stream in September 2022, which had been ordered by President Biden with the acceptance of Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

What the above statements suggest is that the invocation of Article 5 as well as the use of “a pretext” to wage war on Russia are being discussed behind closed doors.

Stoltenberg claims that NATO is committed to supporting Ukraine while “preventing escalation” through “increased military presence” as well as confirming that “we are not part of the conflict”:

Contradictory statement: Is “Preventing Escalation” contemplated by Invoking Article 5?

Among NATO Member States, there are both “Allies” and “Enemies”

It is worth noting that in the course of the last two years, several of America’s European “allies” (NATO member states) whose corrupt politicians are supportive of the Ukraine war, have been the victims of de facto U.S. sponsored acts of economic warfare including the sabotage of Nord Stream.

The EU economy which has relied on cheap energy from Russia is in a shambles, marked by disruptions in the entire fabric of industrial production (manufacturing), transportation and commodity trade. Specifically this applies to actions against Germany, Italy and France, which have resulted in the destabilization of their national economies and the impoverishment of their population. The sabotage of Nord Stream was an U.S. Act of War against both Germany and the European Union. And Germany’s chancellor was fully aware that an act of sabotage against Nord Stream had been envisaged by the US, to the detriment of more than 400 million Europeans.

A string of corporate bankruptcies resulting in lay-offs and unemployment is unfolding across the European Union. Small and medium sized enterprises are slated to be wiped off the map:

In a bitter irony, many of the NATO member states (who are categorized as “allies” under the Atlantic Alliance’s Collective Defense Clause) are the “de facto enemies” of America, victims of U.S. economic warfare. The practice of so-called Collective Defense under Article 5 constitutes a process of mass recruitment by the 30 NATO member states, largely on behalf of Washington’s hegemonic agenda. It was applied twice in NATO’s history: in March 1999 against Yugoslavia and in October 2001 against Afghanistan.

It constitutes on the part of Washington not only a means to recruit soldiers on a massive scale, but also to ensure that NATO member states contribute financially to America’s hegemonic wars: In other words: “to do the fighting for us on our behalf” or “They will do the dirty work for us” (Dick Cheney).

This article has addressed the Unspoken Truth, which we have known all along, from the very outset: “The War Started in 2014”. This statement –which is now acknowledged by NATO– was the basis of my detailed analysis.

My conclusions are as follows:

The Atlantic Alliance has no legitimacy. It is a criminal entity which must be repealed.

US-NATO is responsible for extensive crimes committed against the People of Ukraine. What is required is a Worldwide campaign at all levels of society, with a view to eventually dismantling the Atlantic Alliance, while promoting an immediate cease fire and meaningful peace negotiations in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

In a column published at my blog site and elsewhere this past June 24, “The Return of the ‘Great Disruptor’ – Donald Trump,” I offered reasons why I believed Donald Trump would not only garner the Republican nomination for president in 2024, but why much of the criticism directed against him and his candidacy, mostly from other GOP candidates and various “NeverTrumpers,” was largely ill-founded. I urged support for him because I believe he would be the necessary radical tonic needed to dislodge the managerial and administrative elites who now largely control the American nation, and thus begin a painful, but required process—a veritable counter- revolution—to salvage what is left of this country and just perhaps recover some of the guiding principles and beliefs that once informed the republic.

Two of the major objections to my arguments—certainly the most frequently repeated—I addressed briefly in that earlier column: First, that Trump cannot win the 2024 presidential election, that is, he is unelectable.

The reasoning goes that he would lose college-educated voters and, particularly, upper-middle class females, as well as independents, put off by his personal hijinks and legal woes. And without them, in the general election, he would lose to Joe Biden, despite Biden’s apparent weaknesses and the electoral shenanigans of the Democratic Party. So, the argument goes, the GOP needs to select another candidate, either a DeSantis, or a Mike Pence, or a Tim Scott, someone who doesn’t bring that baggage to the table and could win in 2024.

Second, and perhaps a more substantial criticism is that Trump’s record of appointments during his first term left much to be desired. Indeed, that a number of crucial appointees named by him to positions within his administration, including some high level policy advisers, actually undercut and sabotaged his announced programs and initiatives. In some cases, not just privately, but publicly they opposed an America First agenda. Nearly all of them can be classified as “neoconservatives” and globalists. The list of those malefactors is unfortunately fairly long, including such individuals as John Bolton, “Mad Dog” Mattis, Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Elliott Abrams, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley, to name only a few in the upper echelon who occupied positions of authority and direction (and not counting lower-level administrative personnel). Certainly, most of those appointments were recommended by members of the Republican DC establishment and found sinecures due to President Trump’s initial desire to work with the GOP establishment and cement his surprisingly successful candidacy with party regulars.

That strategy of inclusion and party “unity” was a disaster to the Make America Great Again agenda, but, rather, produced various roadblocks and the uncompletion of Trump’s promised agenda. The question, then, for many on the Right this time round is: would a second Trump term resemble the first one, with an ambitious agenda compromised by a dubiously loyal staff?

Just recently two reports have appeared that answer in large part questions suscitated by these objections.

First, new extensive polling demonstrates that Donald Trump enjoys increased support from college-educated and suburban voters, polling better with those groups than Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis’s key argument was that he was “Trump without the bravado,” a calmer and less controversial—and thus more electable—version of the Donald. He could bring over college-educated voters and independents, voters who Trump scared away.

But a report published by The Washington Examiner (July 27, 2023), using June data from Echelon Insights

​The second report, first published by Bloomberg News (July 21) indicates that President Trump has taken significant steps to avoid the personnel issues and unfinished or undercut agenda items left incomplete from his first term. An analysis of his programmatic “Agenda47” plans reveal that he apparently has learned from the mistakes made during his first term, and he has now surrounded himself with solid, credentialed talent from the populist, MAGA Right.

The Bloomberg report, despite its hostile tone, deserves to be quoted at length:

Reading the Bloomberg report one can fully understand the abject terror, fear and horror of the Left and establishment Republican/conservative elites, as well as their determination to “get Trump” by any and all means—"lawfare,” election manipulation, use of the 14th Amendment to disqualify him as having engaged in sedition, rebellion, and treason…any method, any action, including very possibly outrageous imprisonment, and if President Trump should emerge as a real threat to Deep State dominance, could we see an attempted assassination?

It’s happened before.

After all the virulent, hysterical and unbridled hatred of the 45th president knows no bounds, and nothing is off the table. All the more reason to become informed and to be vitally involved in efforts to assure election integrity.

2024 may well be the year that determines if the American republic can survive, much less recover.

It is absolutely clear now to all but the most ideologically infected or close-minded automaton that the prosecution of President Donald Trump for various levels of malfeasance in regard to his handling of records seized by stormtrooper agents of Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice is just the latest, and most egregious attempt to “get Donald Trump.” It comes after the implosion of the failed “Russia Hoax,” two utterly obscene impeachment efforts, a series of January 6 “show hearings” (which would make the East German Stasi or KGB envious!), and various harassment trials over purported sexual miscues (like the accusations against Justice Kavanaugh, financed by big Democratic Party billionaire Reid Hoffman).

Since Trump’s shocking and unsuspected election to the American nation’s highest office, virtual panic has taken hold not just of the Left, but also conspicuously of the establishment Republican elites, supposedly on the Right. For decades these elites, both the managerial Left and the establishment conservatives, have considered their sinecures and positions of power over the rest of us to be untouchable, and their authority theirs by right. They have formed a kind of self-perpetuating oligarchy, an exclusive Uniparty, and simple citizens, no matter whom they may be, have no right to question its right to control our lives, not just politically, but increasingly via the incestuous partnership with national and international finance corporatism (including the electronic media giants).

One only gets access or elevation to this new elite by making the proper obeisance, mouthing the “correct” messages, appealing to the “correct” financiers and corporate managers, and effectively accepting a certain template and a resultant narrative. There are, of course, some variations which are permitted: one can be a Republican or claim to be a “conservative,” and utter from time-to-time the banal and increasingly stale talking points which are supposed to indicate that a candidate is a “conservative,” or a “constitutionalist,” or “favors lower taxes.” Such affirmations usually occur during fevered election campaigns and are meant to assure and soothe restive voters that candidate X really does represent constituent wishes and will fulfill campaign promises once in office.

Of course, after election, the charade is over for nearly all those candidates, as they slide seamlessly into the embrace of the DC Swamp and begin to “suckle at the teats” of the managerial state. Few there are who dare oppose this immense cabal, for it has the power not just to exile dissenters but effectively silence them. Thus, we have the current example of a Marjorie Taylor Greene who is treated as something of a “wingnut,” mostly shunned by Republican elites.

This brings us ineluctably to the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016, and the near-hysterical, laser-like, and abiding hatred of him. For it is understanding that hatred and those efforts to “get Trump” that in so many ways explain what is occurring in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election: the unceasing efforts using the courts, employing the media, using bare-knuckle politics, to discredit and defeat him, and possibly to imprison him, to stop him by any and all means….

And that is the major reason that Trump should be supported for 2024. Not because of his failings (about which more a little later), but because he represents existentially a real and present—identified—threat to the dominance of the managerial oligarchy which essentially controls our nation. And he does this almost uniquely, far more than any other candidate in the Republican stable (most of whom are considered “manageable” by the Establishment). The unhinged Left (i.e., almost the entirety of the Democratic Party) and Never Trump/Establishment elements of the GOP understand this threat more profoundly than even many of Donald Trump’s nominal supporters, and it literally scares the hell out of them.

I have argued before in several essays that I was not sure to what extent President Trump fully understood his role in what has become, in my view, an epochal and perhaps final battle for the future of the American nation. In 2016 I suggested that his positions came from his intuitions and his instincts, and weren’t really formed “political” or “ideological” perspectives. They just seemed logical to him as a businessman as he viewed the Swamp from the outside. And that also would in part explain reasons why, when he became the GOP candidate and then president, he listened to Republican apparatchiks and attempted in his own way to bring about unity of the party, something traditionally that party candidates did. That effort, as we can state, was probably the most unsuccessful and destructive aspect in his first term, for many of his counsellors and appointments (e.g., Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, “Mad Dog” Mattis, Nikki Haley, et al) did their damnedest to undercut and stifle his announced positions and programs. And perhaps his own initial political naivete’ compounded matters, as well.

Yet despite some frustrated initiatives, some uncompleted programs, and frequent internal administration sabotage, Trump achieved something that no president in a century had accomplished: he forced the fangs of the fearsome managerial state out into public view for the first time.

Back in 2016 I first argued that Donald Trump’s role was akin to a “bull-in-china-shop,” to break the taboos of the Left and the managerial elites, and, at best, to force the maniacal establishment to lower its mask which for decades had occulted its actual intentions and its progressive infection of our society’s historic institutions with a virulent and fatal venom. That infection had been percolating for years, it had near total control of our educational and academic institutions, it largely dominated our entertainment industry, it controlled most of our media, and it had forced an iron-clad template on our politics…that is, until Trump came upon the scene.

As he spoke mostly off-script during the 2016 campaign, he gave voice to the fundamental views of regular citizens, that broad swathe of folks which Hilary Clinton called “deplorable,” and who now are denominated “MAGA.” Those rumblings, those views, previously had been mostly unexpressed on a national level; most citizens lacked a real means to do so. The few earlier major figures challenging the status quo, the progressivist Leftist “long march” through our institutions, had been sidelined, silenced, or exiled from the public square.

But as Trump spoke, he rattled cages, challenged establishment bromides, and questioned the progressivist template, whether he fully understood that or not. No matter that some of his rhetoric never made it into real programs or was stymied from within. The really significant factor was that he said it fearlessly from a national bully pulpit, that he made it acceptable to be a real opponent of the ongoing progressivist Leftist transformation, and that his presence unleashed an actual counter-revolution of sorts which, despite heightened persecution and concerted “cancelling,” continues. In that sense, Trump opened a Pandora’s Box which, since his election, the DC Uniparty has been unable to close, despite its frantic and heavy-handed stepped-up efforts.

Thus we come to the lead-up to the election of 2024 and the continued frenetic and unleashed efforts to stop Trump, not just by the fanatical Left but also by the self-satisfied Republican establishment. But unlike in 2016 or even 2020, that reaction is far more poisonous, widespread, and ingrained in the institutions of our society. And it has marshalled legions of Never-Trumpers and those who have convinced themselves of oft-repeated refrains that: “Trump can’t win,” or “Trump will bring down other Republican candidates,” or “Trump is a moral reprobate and will lose the women’s vote.”

None of these accusations is actually true; nevertheless, they have taken hold even of some sincere persons on the Right. Any summary of polls over the past few months indicates that in addition to running away with the Republican nomination by huge margins, Trump can beat Biden in the general election. A RealClearPolitics average of all presidential polls (June 20, 2023) has Trump slightly ahead of Biden in an eventual face-off. He has a lead among independents (Economist/YouGov, June 9, 2023) and leads DeSantis among Republican women (Washington Examiner). More than that, an honest examination of the 2022 election reveals that Trump-supported candidates, contrary to the illusory claims bandied so widely about, were victorious in 236 contests out of 274 where he made endorsements, according to a Bloomberg News compilation (November 15, 2022)—more than a 6 to 1 margin of wins. He was not a drag on Republican candidates; rather, election mechanics and widespread rigging in key states played a far more significant role in a few high-profile GOP defeats. Those defeats cannot be laid at the feet of Donald Trump.

These arguments against Trump, then, collapse.

Other critics maintain that: “Trump has made promises he hasn’t kept,” or “Trump appointed and listened to bad advisors.” Even the staunchest Trump supporter can acknowledge that, even with the many positive things the Donald accomplished in his first term (e.g., especially three critical Supreme Court Justices), his selection of advisors and, at times, appointments, undercut much of his announced 2016 agenda. Yet, closely monitoring his campaign in 2023 and examining his Agenda47 items, he seems to have learned from mistakes made in 2017-2021.

The essential point is that Donald Trump is the one candidate the managerial Deep State really fears, and the reason for that is that he is the Great Disruptor, he endangers their hegemony and their seemingly unstoppable advance to globalist domination. In reality, his abiding support has little to do with whether he would advocate lowering taxes, or reducing foreign entanglements, or even completing a border wall—these are all very important, of course. But the often-unspoken reason that Trump supporters are so committed is that they know intuitively he is the wrecking-ball that is so sorely needed along the banks of the Potomac these days…as well as in Bruxelles and Davos. And with wrecking-balls, at times the process is messy and untidy.

No one else elicits more abject fear and loathing from our enemies than Donald Trump; no one else can bring on the necessary and probably final confrontation with the progressivist forces of the Leftist managerial state. The MAGA folks understand that the sooner this final confrontation occurs, the better are their chances of success. Other, more establishment-oriented candidates who propose a return to “normalcy,” only prolong our national agony while essentially allowing the rot to continue.
​
That is unacceptable and a recipe for the certain disappearance of the American nation as we have known it.

​On Sunday, June 11, 2023, my dear friend and a man who is rightly called “the Dean of Southern Historians,” Dr. Clyde N. Wilson, will celebrate his 82nd birthday. For some fruitful fifty-five of those years he has been at the forefront of efforts to make the history of his native region better known, and, as events and severe challenges to that history have happened at a dizzying pace, he has stood, like one of his admired historical figures, General Thomas J. Jackson, “as a stonewall” resisting the increasing insanity and madness of our age.
​
His various books, including the published multi-volume complete works of Southern statesman John C. Calhoun (University of South Carolina), books of essays, edited volumes, annotated bibliographies, and hundreds of articles give testimony to a tireless, indefatigable champion, intent on both mining and revealing the richness of Southern history and also resolutely defending it against powerful and virulent enemies, both nationally and amongst us. Unlike far too many of his fellow Southerners, Dr. Wilson has understood that the geographical region we call “the South” has had an important role not just in the 350 year existence of the land we call “America,” but in a very real sense in maintaining that Western Christian heritage inherited from original settlers, to the point of going to war to defend that precious patrimony.

I think it was when I was in grad school at the University of Virginia in the early 1970s that I first came across articles and essays by Clyde Wilson. I was already reading National Review and the quarterly, Modern Age (long before they went over to Neoconservative/NeoReconstructionism). Wilson, along with writers like Mel Bradford and Russell Kirk, for whom I served as assistant the year after securing my MA in history, wrote fairly regularly for what was called “conservative media.” Southerners were welcomed by such publications back then. Indeed, Kirk dedicated an entire issue of Modern Age (which he founded) to Southern conservatism (Fall 1958). Older Southern writers, essayists, and poets associated with the Southern “Agrarians,” men of stature like Donald Davidson, Andrew Lytle, and Cleanth Brooks, continued their labors in their twilight years.

When I returned to the United States after earning a doctorate at the University of Navarra, in Spain, and teaching for a while in Argentina in 1981, I began to reacquaint myself with writers and the culture of my homeland. Soon I was contributing essays to the Southern Partisan magazine and renewing my friendships with Mel Bradford and Russell Kirk.

Then, in 1990 I came across a book which made a profound and lasting impression on me: Carolina Cavalier: The Life and Mind of James Johnston Pettigrew (University of Georgia, 1990), by Clyde N. Wilson. In fact, the volume was an edited version of his Ph.D. dissertation presented at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1971. At that time UNC was hospitable to more conservative and traditional scholarship; not only Professor Wilson, but also former Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming, and my former co-worker at the North Carolina State Archives, Wilson Angley, all finished their graduate degrees there.

Pettigrew, a noted Confederate general who fell at Falling Waters during the retreat from Gettysburg, like Wilson and myself was a North Carolinian. Like most Southern boys who came of age during the “Civil War Centennial” (1961-1965) and a Tar Heel born and bred, I had some idea of Pettigrew’s exploits during the War. But I was unprepared for the wealth of detail which Wilson revealed. For indeed James Johnston Pettigrew was a man larger than life who, if he had lived, might have become one of the nation’s finest essayists and writers.  In Carolina Cavalier Wilson discusses at length Pettigrew’s “travel book,” Notes on Spain and the Spaniards (1861), which like English author Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome, is far more than a simple travelogue. Like Belloc forty years later, Pettigrew possessed the ability to translate his observations into meaningful and eloquently descriptive paragraphs which in a profound sense soar above the printed page and in an impressionistic way speak of the continuity and grandeur of our Western culture. His understanding of Spanish traditions and religion have seldom, if ever, been matched by any American. And from a certain perspective, is there not in his exquisitely expressed, philosophical understanding and descriptions of Spanish society a veiled, analogous comparison to his own Southland?

A few years after acquiring a copy of Carolina Cavalier I was able to bring Clyde Wilson back to North Carolina. We had begun to correspond, and since I was chairman of North Carolina’s Annual Confederate Flag Day observances, I invited him to come to Raleigh and offer remarks in the old Senate chamber of the historic 1840 State Capitol. He was one of the distinguished guests of note we had over the years, including Don Livingston, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and North Carolina Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake, Jr.  And shortly afterwards, Pettigrew’s volume which had been out-of-print for well over a century, was brought out in a facsimile edition by the University of South Carolina Press (2010), with a new introduction by Wilson.

Another significant work which Dr. Wilson produced was The Essential Calhoun: Selections from Writings, Speeches, and Letters (2017), with an introduction by Russell Kirk, a valuable primer for students of the great South Carolinian who have been perhaps deterred by the daunting task of searching through the edited twenty-eight volumes!

Additional works include his several polemical volumes in “The Wilson Files”; his four books in the “Southern Reader’s Guide” series; From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition; Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture, and several significant published symposiums which he has edited. Dr. Wilson has also been the M. E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute, which specializes in the online publication of Southern writers and holding seminars on Southern themes. And he is the guiding spirit behind Shotwell Publishing in Columbia, South Carolina, offering an outlet for Southern authors and their manuscripts.

During his thirty-two years as professor of history at the University of South Carolina, Dr. Wilson taught a wide variety of courses in history and directed sixteen doctoral dissertations. His legacy of scholarship and love for the history of his native region, thus, is carried on by those—and other—students who were privileged to study under him.  And by many thousands more who have read his books or attended his conferences, or been so fortunate as to call him a friend.

Would that in the midst of today’s vicious offensive against everything traditionally Southern there were more teachers and giants like Clyde Wilson.

There is a memorable passage in Donald Davidson’s magnificent poem, “Lee in the Mountains,” which in a way sums up Clyde Wilson’s resilience and heroically staunch defense of his beloved Southland:

Then, let us wish Clyde Wilson a most happy and blessed 82nd birthday, and ad multos annos! May your critical labors go on and continue to inspire us!

This piece was published at My Corner on June 8, 2023.

Some years ago (summer 1974) when I was completing a doctorate in history and political science in Europe, I made a journey south from Rome to the Italian city of Naples. Earlier, before traveling to Europe on a Richard Weaver Fellowship, I had managed to read two engrossing volumes on the Bourbon monarchy of the Kingdom of Naples by Sir Harold Acton. The old Kingdom of Naples (or of “Two Sicilies,” as it was formally called) had been conquered by the freebooter Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “Red Shirts,” in cooperation with the northern, liberal Italian Kingdom of Piedmont Savoy, in the early months of 1861.

That resolutely traditionalist country, basically all of southern Italy and Sicily, fascinated me. The Neapolitan kingdom was perhaps the most anti-liberal, traditionalist nation in all of Europe prior to it disappearance by conquest into the new centralized Italian state. Its capital, Naples, was an international center of culture and brilliance; musicians, composers, writers, and artists from all round Europe congregated there. All of that would end after Italian occupation. And southern Italy, “Due Sicilia,” would descend into an extended era of poverty, subjugation, and eventual neglect, much like that inflicted on the states of the Confederacy after the War Between the States.

But what was more intriguing for me was to learn that after the surrender of King Francis II and his small Neapolitan army at the fortress of Gaeta in late February 1861 (after an heroic four month siege), several thousand army regulars of the Royal Neapolitan Army clandestinely boarded ships, evaded a British cordon, and managed to sail for New Orleans to volunteer for the newly-formed Confederate Army. The first ships arrived from Naples with 884 former members of the army of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies to take up arms for the Confederacy in early 1861. That number of Neapolitan volunteers soon rose to approximately 2000.

Initially, they were enlisted in several Louisiana Confederate units, including the 10th Louisiana Infantry and eventually other regiments, including a European Brigade which counted traditionalist Catholic volunteers from Spain (mostly royalist Carlists, who arrived by way of Mexico), France (French Legitimists, supporters of the old French Bourbon monarchy), Ireland, and a few from Austria. There were Protestant volunteers, as well, with soldiers coming from England and German lands.

The Neapolitan volunteers fought at most of the major actions in the Trans-Mississippi. When the war ended, some returned to Italy, but others remained in the Southland, where their descendants continue to reside.

From Harold Acton I knew that the small Italian walled commune of Civitella del Tronto, atop a mountain in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, had been the last bastion of resistance to the northern Italian liberals, yielding finally on March 20, 1861. There in that remote mountain town is a museum (Museo delle Armi e Mappe antiche) dedicated to the history of armaments and the military of old Italy. And among its exhibits is a memorable one dedicated to the veterans who fought both for the long-gone Kingdom of Naples and also for the Southern Confederacy. A large Battle Flag is displayed (I assume it is still there) honoring those men, along with other items and relics. Both the Royal Neapolitan standard and the Battle Flag are customarily flown outside on occasion.

​It was indeed one location I had to visit.

And it raised a question—why did those conservative, mostly Catholic traditionalists leave their home countries and come to the newly-created Confederate States of America and offer their services? What did they see in our new nation that convinced them to make such a sacrifice on behalf of a country not their own?

In reading European contemporary newspapers, correspondence, and journals from the period it became apparent to me that those men, that “band of brothers,” understood instinctively that the Cause of the South was an international cause, one which stood forthrightly against a headlong plunge into modernism, opposed to the worldwide ravages of revolution, liberal democracy and the eventual destruction of age-old customs and beliefs. The South they saw as a hierarchical society based in the real and absolute inequalities of Nature. The South stood against the encroachments of unrestricted capitalism and the philosophical underpinnings that supported that reality. The leaders of the South, albeit mostly Protestant, were descendants of the Cavaliers, and thus represented the best and noblest Americans, to be emulated and admired, as opposed to the Yankee scions of the New England Puritans.

Many of the foreign volunteers had already fought in struggles against liberalism in their own countries, and, as in the cases of Naples and Spain, had been on the losing side. This was the case with my Spanish friend, the Baron de Montevilla, whose ancestor fought both in Spain in the Carlist Wars, and later for the Confederacy. When an acquaintance asked his ancestor, “How can you justify fighting for two lost causes?,” he replied: “A lost cause is never really lost if the fight is for what is true and what is right.” (see “Paladins of Christian Civilization: The Universality of the Confederate Cause,” Confederate Veteran, September/October 2017 )

That very favorable view of the Confederacy and its leaders, if certainly debatable, was exemplified in the foreign conservative press by its glowing portraits of men such as Robert E. Lee, Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Jeb Stuart, but also of such figures as the brilliant writer General James Johnston Pettigrew (whose volume Notes on Spain and the Spaniards is undoubtedly one of the finest and most philosophical “travel journals” that any American has written (and deserves to be more widely-known), “Stonewall” Jackson’s chaplain, Robert Lewis Dabney (whose writings are equally impressive), and various others.
The similarities between the defeated and prostrate South, and the defeated and downtrodden former Neapolitan kingdom are, in some ways, remarkable—not just in the losing wars forced upon them, but in the survival of memory and a continuing devotion to heritage.

Just as defenders of Confederate heritage, in organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Order of the Confederate Rose, are devoted to honoring their ancestors and defending the Cause for which they, in many cases, gave their lives, some southern Italians, descendants of those defenders at Gaeta and Civitella del Tronto, likewise seek to keep the memory and traditions of their forefathers alive. And in recent years, in active organizations such as the Associazione Culturale Neo-Borbonica (ACNB), they do exactly that all across the former territories of the ancient Kingdom of Naples.

Several years ago the ACNB issued a manifesto, a statement not only of principles but a summary of history. As you read the translation below (which I have tweaked just a bit), perhaps you will notice the dramatic analogies between the history of our Southland and of the Neapolitan lands, and why the cause of neither is yet extinguished.

"On the cold afternoon of December 27, 1894, in the town of Arco, province of Trento, Francesco II of Bourbon, the last king of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (Naples), died. The Bourbon dynasty no longer governed Southern Italy after a reign of 126 years. One hundred years after the death of King Francesco, no one remembers the Bourbons except as a negative symbol of the past. Never has history been so unkind and maliciously falsified as it has been with this king and with this dynasty. 126 years of prestige and of glory, of art and culture, of theatres and factories, of laws and achievements, of public works and archeological excavations, of order, of security, of riches, and of generosity have---all has been erased from our collective memory.

"The Piedmontese from the North, with the self-interested complicity of the English and the French, invaded the peaceful Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which extended from Latium [Rome] to Sicily over all of Southern Italy. Francesco II, at 24 years age, found himself fighting an unexpected and undesired war against his "Italian brothers"…. the Neapolitan army fought valiantly alongside its king and its heroic queen, Maria Sofia, who was barely nineteen. It surrendered after 93 days of siege at the fortress of Gaeta, at dawn on February 14, 1861. Thousands of heroic citizens of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies died on the battlefield. In the same way, subsequently during the decade of the 1860s, thousands of men, women, and children perished in a reconstruction campaign against Southerners - they were called "bandits" or "brigands", but they were, in fact, the last soldiers and defenders of a history, a tradition, and a culture that seemed to die with them forever.

"But what were conditions before this fatal unification of Italy? Certainly, everything was not perfect, but it is worth noting that Naples was the capital of a kingdom born seven centuries earlier. Together with London, Paris and Vienna, Naples was an essential point of reference with regards to both political and cultural affairs in Italy and in Europe….

"It is a fact that Piedmont carried away 80 million ducats cash from our banks (more than $ 1,000,000,000). It is a fact that we had more than 5,000 factories (among the great nations in the world). It is a fact that the streets of our beautiful cities were full of tourists that came from every part of the world. It is a fact that the Piedmontese made us pay more than twice the level of taxes we paid before unification. After unification, due to widespread hunger, more than five million emigrants left their families and homes and would never again see their native land. In the streets of our cities, we no longer saw tourists. Our factories were soon closed and still today we buy, eat, drink, wear, and use only products that come from Northern Italy. One cannot say today that Southern Italians live well; the average income of a Northern Italian is twice that of a Southerner; the ten poorest cities in Italy are all in the South. With unemployment, poor services, government crises, untenable immigration from Africa, and the collapse of a flawed political system, a rosy future for our children is highly unlikely. From the elementary school texts to those used by college students, we hear a tale much different than the truth. In 150 years, they have made us ashamed of being Southerners. They have said that our dialects were "vulgar", that our traditions were uncivilized, that being a "Southerner" or a "Bourbon" meant being backward, nostalgic, ignorant, or uncivilized. We have begun, as Tacitus wrote two thousand years ago, to "admire their way of life, of dress or of speech, forgetting our own and thinking that theirs was civilization when it was only a ploy to dominate us."

"Until 1860, the citizens of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were respected and esteemed in all the world because they were citizens of an ancient and prestigious kingdom…. We were respected and esteemed because we were subjects of a king that belonged to the Bourbon dynasty - an ancient dynasty but one capable of governing with wisdom and love. Upon all of this came the unbearable weight of the destruction of our historical consciousness, of our culture, of our traditions, and of our identity - the pain of the destruction of our white flags with gold fleurs-de-lis, our national anthem, and of all the symbols that were respected by the ancient and glorious Neapolitan nation. The Bourbons showed all the pride and dignity of being Southerners until the very end, when, on the earthworks of Gaeta, they behaved as heroes and fought night and day beneath the violent and incessant bombardment of the Piedmontese invaders. They wanted to defend, right until the end, 126 years of glorious and splendid history - 126 years of Bourbon civilization.

"Francesco II left Naples amidst tears and embraces to avoid a massacre of his people - a people he knew so well, whose language was his own. Many people got rich with the unification of Italy, but not the Bourbons. Francesco II - little Francesco or "Franceschiello" as he was affectionately called - left his kingdom not taking with him one dime of money. The Italian government never gave back that which belonged to his family, and even today has never done so. Francesco II never returned to Naples. He died at age 58 in a hotel room in Arco di Trento [then part of Austria] comforted only by his great faith in God and by a profoundly Christian sense of acceptance, but without ever forgetting, even in the last days of his life, the country of his father and of his grandfather - his own native land. Only since 1984 does he lie next to his wife and his tiny daughter Maria Cristina in the Bourbon chapel of the Church of Santa Chiara in Naples. Few are those who remember him - he who was guilty only of having been on our side, among the defeated.

"Why then be a Bourbon today? Because the time has finally come to understand who we were and who we can be. The time has come to begin to uncover our lost roots and to give to our children the roots they never knew - to give to them a sense of pride in being Southern Italian. To be a Bourbon means to understand history. To be a Neo-Bourbon means to have understood history with the desire and drive to construct a revived history on the base of the old for all the people of Southern Italy. Certainly the Bourbon period was not the "Golden Age," and one cannot say we would have entered into a "Golden Age" if the Bourbons had continued to reign. But no one can deny that, during that cold winter of 161 years ago, the people of Southern Italy ceased to be a People. 161 years ago, Southern Italy ceased to be a nation. The historical memory and consciousness…began to be extinguished on the battlements of Gaeta.

"Some may call us "nostalgic", but how can one not be when one walks through the streets of our run-down and degraded cities or passes before our ancient buildings, churches, and monuments, now lost or forgotten? Yes, we are nostalgic and proud of being such, but our looking back serves a purpose. Now, more than ever, it is necessary to understand what are the real causes of our current problems in Southern Italy and how we can find the road toward a better future. The system and the ideology that have governed our politics and our culture for a century and a half have demonstrated that they are based on a deliberate lie. Southern politicians and intellectuals over the last century, closed off in isolation from the world around them, soiled the memory of the House of Bourbon of the Two Sicilies, but also demonstrated their incapability of representing or loving their own South.

"Honesty, dignity, loyalty, courage, religious faith, wisdom, respect for history, love of art, affection for the land and the people of the Two Sicilies - these were the fundamental characteristics of all the Bourbon kings of Naples. Fortified by these examples and by these symbols we can and must liberate ourselves from the systems and ideologies that are already collapsing into ruins and which are responsible for having destroyed the past and the present of an entire people and of putting their future in jeopardy.

"Let us recover our historical memory - recover our pride in being Southerners - and walk together on the long road towards the salvation of our ancient nation and of our ancient dignity." (ASSOCIAZIONE CULTURALE NEO-BORBONICA  http://www.neoborbonici.it/portal/ )

Since the Charleston church shooting in 2015, the hysterical—I would say diabolical—attack on everything Confederate and traditionally Southern has continued non-stop. Our monuments have been desecrated and removed from public spaces, relegated to obscure museums or storage barns, sometimes smashed to bits (the latest outrage is the uprooting of the monument to General A. P. Hill in Richmond which had crowned his very grave for decades—his remains moved to a private cemetery, but the statue to a Black History Museum for additional scorn and degradation).

Our flags have been banned and termed “symbols of hate.” Entire sections of public libraries have seen anything remotely favorable to Confederate history and heritage expunged. Our children and grandchildren, if they are taught anything substantial at all about the War for Southern Independence, are instructed that the conflict was one of evil white oppressors attempting to maintain (and spread) slavery and “white privilege.” So-called “conservative” authors and media personalities condemn Southern tradition as “racist” just as those on the frenzied Left, and seek to forever expel an entire and integral part of the history of the American nation from any reasonable and fair comprehension.

How many times must we watch and listen to obnoxious Fox personalities such as Karl Rove, Marc Thiessen, Bret Baier, and Brian Kilmeade (who praises the radical actions of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass in a book, no doubt largely ghost written for him) or writers at the one-time “conservative” magazine, National Review, or self-appointed conservative-favored historians like Allen Guelzo, warmly praise the destruction of the Southland and the deification of “Father Abraham,” with the concomitant destruction of the old American constitutional system?

Our so-called “conservative” Republican defenders, political creatures without souls like Senators Thom Tillis, Tim Scott, and Lindsey Graham, and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, have not only gone along with this cultural genocide, but in many cases have led and championed it. How many “conservative” GOP Southern senators stood up to oppose the original proposal (2019) for a national Naming Commission to ruthlessly remove the names of our nation’s military posts (and any and all iconography associated with them) which in any way recalls the honor and careers of anyone related to the Confederacy? You can count them on just one hand.

The most recent example of action by the Naming Commission is its dedicated effort to uproot and remove the Arlington National Cemetery Monument to the Confederate veterans buried there. That supremely historical and artistically beautiful statue was created by famed sculptor Moses Ezekiel, a proud Jewish Confederate, whose work is known and respected internationally. But more than that, the monument’s erection was supported by four American presidents as a major gesture symbolizing the real re-union of North and South. Yet today’s “conservative” representatives in many ways are far worse than Joseph Stalin’s iconoclasts; they are evil cultural barbarians. Their actions are a direct and demonic attack not only on the very understanding of the Framers’ view of the American federation, but also on the collective weight of Christian tradition, itself.
Perhaps more disconcerting is the apparent apathy and lack of concern shown by so many of our fellow Southerners. Anesthetized by far too many of our elected representatives and their pseudo-defense of our traditions and heritage, mired in the neo-abolitionist “newspeak” of favored “conservative media outlets” like Fox News, their children infected by the schools,  and brain-dead, thanks to jaundiced entertainment, is it any wonder our compatriots are poisoned by regional self-hatred and a resulting feeling that, as one friend recently told me, “nothing can be done—we just have to live with it.”

With this understanding and sobering observation in mind, I return to a Christmas message I authored several years ago. It is a message of Hope in the midst of Darkness. With a few changes, I think it may have even more resonance now for traditional Southerners in today’s world which is increasingly consumed by madness, apostasy, and outright rebellion against the laws of Nature and of God.

Lest we forget, it has been nineteen years since the film “Gods and Generals” was released to screens across the United States—to be exact, on February 21, 2003—almost ten years after the release of the blockbuster film, “Gettysburg.”

“Gods and Generals” was based on the historical novel by Jeff Shaara, while “Gettysburg” was based on a work by his father, Michael Shaara. An intended third installment, “The Last Full Measure,” which would have carried events of the War Between the States to its conclusion, was shelved after critics savaged “Gods and Generals,” citing what Wikipedia termed its “length, pacing, screenplay, and endorsement of the controversial neo-Confederate ‘Lost Cause’ myth.”

Undoubtedly, “Gods and Generals” is more episodic than its prequel, which indeed centers its action around one pivotal event in the war, the epochal Battle of Gettysburg. And, yes, it is long—the director’s cut is four hours and forty minutes in duration. Yet, “Gettysburg” in its original version is only slightly shorter. But given its thematic unity it succeeds, perhaps, as more theatrical and digestible by a public attuned to simpler plots and more compact storylines. Whereas in “Gettysburg” the viewer watches as events unfold steadily toward an eventual climax that we all know is coming and at the same time manages to engage those who experience it as if—somehow—it is happening now for the first time, “Gods and Generals” is somewhat reminiscent of a mini-series with episodic segments attempting to offer viewers an impression of how the war actually began and how, in its first two years, it was fought.

In a certain sense, then, “Gods and Generals” is akin to a docudrama.  I think here of such filmed efforts as “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970) and the two-part drama “Hiroshima” from 1995 (which is over three hours long but in two parts). And I believe this is the best way to judge it and to see it. For throughout its episodic nature it does exactly what it sets out to do—give a broad and panoramic view of major events occurring (albeit mostly in Virginia) in 1861 and 1862 while attempting to infuse life and believability into the history it portrays.

Both films now are roundly condemned as defending “white supremacy” and engaging in “neo-Confederate ideology,” and the celebration of “the myths of the ‘Lost Cause’.” And “Gods and Generals” gets the worst of it. Yet, in many ways, given its unfolding denouement and diverse focus, it succeeds admirably in painting vivid pictures in intimate, and at times endearing, detail of major historical characters.

Some reviewers have written, and I think rightly so, that “Gods and Generals” is in large part a biographical look, a kind of portrayal of General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Indeed, much of the film revolves around him, his beliefs, his code of ethics, his brilliant and unparalleled generalship, and his remarkable humanity. Indeed, Stephen Lang’s portrayal of Jackson has been lauded, if begrudgingly, by some reviewers even if they dislike the film.

Then, there is Robert Duvall’s incarnation of Robert E. Lee, and, for me, he simply is Marse Robert, and far more impressive and “real” than Martin Sheen’s assumption in “Gettysburg,” which I found unnatural and too stagey.

I recall viewing the film with friends from work when “Gods and Generals” first showed up in the theaters. Back then we were able to take time off from our jobs to go—but that was 2003, and with the passing of nineteen short years since then I doubt that we could get the same benevolent permission to leave work for such an activity today. And that says a lot—far too much—about how the times and the country have radically changed. From the rumbles of political correctness so visibly apparent, yet not completely dominant, of twenty years ago, to the insane and hysterical full assault on everything, and anything, in and of our Southern heritage, we have descended into a hellish cauldron in which our culture and our people face virtual extinction.

All the more reason to return to films—and they are rare—like “Gods and Generals,” which actually assist us to both see and hear history without the accumulated ideological and poisonous dross that infects almost everything coming out of Hollywood these days. Given the extent of advancing “cancel culture” in our day, we need to treasure films like “Gods and Generals” and “Gettysburg,” as well as others such as “The Conspirator” (2010) and dozens of movies made before this age of cinematic putrefaction.

What I’d like to do, then, following the accusation that “Gods and Generals” is overly long, episodic and perhaps too diffuse, without a certain thematic unity, is to take seven pivotal scenes from the film, each around two or three minutes in length, and offer them in succession (though not necessarily chronologically). Each scene and representation offers, I would suggest, a “key” to the underlying objectives of the movie; that is, what it is attempting to portray, both cinematically and historically. Certainly, there are other significant scenes and moments in a four and half hour film that can be highlighted; but those I have chosen, I believe, are essential in understanding the personalities and critical issues “Gods and Generals” hoped to examine when it appeared in 1993.

So, let’s take a look via YouTube at the scenes I have in mind. Although they take only a total of about 18 minutes, seen in succession they form a natural progression of themes in “Gods and Generals,” and an enticement to go back and spend the time to view the entire film, with perhaps a keener appreciation of its objectives and how they relate to the whole.

First, there is the magnificent scene with Robert E. Lee (played with absolute realism and believability by Robert Duvall), refusing command offered to him of the entire Federal army intended to suppress the “cotton states” and succinctly stating his reasons why (April 1861) (3:55):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeGBpTFZhh4

Then, in logical order Lee’s acceptance (after he had resigned from the US Army and after Virginia had seceded—so there is absolutely NO question of treason at all) of command of the troops of the independent State of Virginia (2:51):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLKofMCiMOE

Both clips in a few well-chosen phrases give the viewer a basic refresher in constitutional theory as understood by the Framers of the Constitution—and enunciated by Lee and the Virginia assembly, essentially framing why there was a war and why Southerner were completely justified in resisting the usurpations of a reckless Federal government, intent on violent anti-constitutional subjugation.

The third clip shows General Jackson before the First Battle of Manassas, invoking the assistance of Almighty God, and connecting the Confederate cause with Godliness and the necessity to defend those God-given rights conferred on his fellow citizens. The YouTube excerpt captures Jackson’s fervent faith, a faith that was shared by his fellow Southerners (1:50):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC_VHIVq0P4

Now, we see General Jackson’s depth of patriotism and devotion to the Cause, and his comprehension that what the new Confederacy was attempting was truly a “Second War for Independence.” One cannot help but be moved by Jackson’s address to the First Brigade. His words resonate today as they did back then (2:31):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkqZncVDxN8

Here we have what we may call the Confederate General Staff as assembled at Fredericksburg for Christmas, 1862. And once again Stonewall Jackson, interacting with a young girl, is moved to encapsulate many of the sincere wishes and longings of Confederates under arms in defense of their homeland and their families (3:29):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59AGVg9VJyg

Next we have General Lee (Duvall), before the Battle of Fredericksburg, poetically recalling his history, his family, and fundamental beliefs that course in the veins of every thinking Southerner whose memory has not been destroyed or polluted by the dominant American culture (1:10):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiJKhs4r4CM

As a final scene in my series, and a defiant reminder of the importance of our heritage and our present duty, I pass on perhaps the most inspiring moment in the film—“The Bonnie Blue Flag,” as sung by the assembled Confederates in winter quarters. Even as “Dixie” is, in a sense, “the national anthem of the South,” “The Bonnie Blue Flag” represents an exultant and militant Southland and its citizens, ready always to do their duty to family and country, under the guidance of and obedience to Almighty God (2:28).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-3WAhbulFs

Thus my vision of how we can see and comprehend some of major points in “Gods and Generals,” and relate to the film historically, by becoming part of it, seeing with the eyes of its characters and fathoming what they were able to recreate historically. Not just a “re-enactment,” but a window into the lives and minds of our ancestors, and a path to a greater understanding of what they did and why they did it.

Increasingly I despair of this country. The more I read and see, the more I am confirmed in my view that the "American Empire" is reaching a final phase and that our "shelf life" is expiring, just as all other great empires—Roman, Ottoman, British—have expired.

I keep coming back to William Butler Yeats' lines (written one-hundred and three years ago, after the cataclysm that was World War I), in his poem, "The Second Coming": "The best lack all conviction; while the worst are filled with passionate intensity." Yet, it is even more tragic, it is no longer a situation of "lacking conviction," but rather the "best" now mimicking the enemies of civilization, the "best" acting as if under hypnosis and acceding to rampant evil with enthusiasm...what a friend of mine calls the "zombiefication" of those who were once charged with defending our culture and civilizational heritage. Now they ape our enemies and fall into line like lemmings.  

This has been the response I have gotten from some friends over this Ukraine conflict. Their passion is often clothed in an hysteria that characterizes and shrouds what is occurring. On a more global level, I can cite example after example, from banning "Russian" vodka and banning Russian cats (!), to firing dozens of world-famous Russian classical artists (e.g., Valery Gergiev, Anna Netrebko, etc.), to expunging famous Russian novelists from our university classrooms, to removing Russian-made caviar from U.S. sale, to banning Russian chess players from international competition, to (in Germany) banning the "Z" symbol because in Russia it is similar to "V for victory" (conviction in Deutschland will get you three years in the slammer!)... The list is inexhaustible.  

One very ironic example: I listen while I work here on my Desk Top computer to a Sirius XM program, "Symphony Hall." The announcers, especially one Martin Goldsmith on the weekends, search strenuously to find Ukrainian music to program. And, voila! recently he came upon the composer Sergei Bortkiewicz, who happened to be born in Kharkov, then part of the Russian empire and a largely Russian-language city. Bortkiewicz was descended from Polish nobility and was an enthusiastic supporter of Imperial Russia, and he considered himself a true-blue Russian.  When the Russian Revolution came, he fled to Western Europe.

Now, here is where it becomes ironic, if not a bit comical. Goldsmith and the other announcers--over the top with their unctuous praise of the "Ukrainian" Bortkiewicz--have been playing his first symphony (several years ago I purchased it, along with several other pieces he wrote--I also read up on his life and music. So, I know something about him and his history). However, much to their surprise at the end of his very listenable and old-fashioned opus Bortkiewicz inserts the clearly-audible strains of the old Tsarist Imperial hymn! It is an indication of Bortkiewicz's steadfast loyalty to old Russia and its imperial system.  

Nevertheless, since Bortkiewicz was born in what is now Ukraine his music gets extensive playing time as Goldsmith (and others), who seem ready to weep, hold him up as a noble defender of Ukrainian liberal democracy.

There is even a Youtube video of his Symphony No. 1 being performed by a Ukrainian orchestra, but with the Tsarist anthem at the end excised - censored, if you will! To what lengths blind zealotry and jingoistic nationalism will go. 

And these announcers are--at least as far as I can tell--highly educated. But what they are doing is to perpetrate a fraud, with a frenzy and brainless zeal that makes one think, indeed, that my friend's comment about "zombiefication" is right on the mark.

I think it possible to believe that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was ill-advised or wrong, that Putin should not have ordered his troops in. Fine. But this over-the-top, frenzied Russophobia bespeaks something more ominous, about those who engage in it and those who are possessed by it. Could this excess, this mania, be used—just like the COVID epidemic—for ulterior purposes, somehow to advance the objectives of the global Deep State? After all, George Soros from the get go has been an intense cheer-leader and an active player with his various NGOs in what is going on. 

And the poor, devastated Ukrainian people? They become the cannon-fodder in this--the Nancy Pelosis and Lindsey Grahams do not, when it comes down to it, really care about them. Like Soros, they have ulterior goals, including regime change in Russia---teaching the Russkies their "place" in the global scheme of things. Using the Ukrainian people as a means to achieve that objective is, for them, a never mind.

That many on "our side" do not see that, do not understand that, saddens me.  By all means, criticize Putin for invading, if you wish; but please understand what is actually going on.

Yes, "zombiefication" is a good word here.  

My prayer is that soon sane negotiators in Ukraine and Russia will find a solution. Yet, it is evident that our state department neoconservative war hawks do not want peace, but rather to bleed Russia dry and hopefully effect regime change, another "color revolution"--even if it means the death of every Ukrainian citizen to do it!
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We live in perilous times when Yeats' words take on a renewed and  terrifying meaning.

​Back in early 1981 the brilliant Southern scholar and traditionalist, Professor Mel Bradford, was the leading contender to receive President Ronald Reagan’s nomination as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bradford was the epitome of the accomplished and erudite academician, yet his deep-rooted Southern and pro-Confederate beliefs disqualified him in the eyes of many national “conservatives” such as George Will and Bill Kristol. Bradford’s worst sin, they asserted, had been that he had harshly (if with laser-like precision and accuracy) criticized the modern icon within the “conservative movement”—Abraham Lincoln.

Bradford’s major accusations were that Lincoln essentially “remade” the American constitutional system, asserting “equality” as the country’s foundational value and enlarging the ultimate power of the federal government at the expense of the states, and, thus, beginning a process of governmental expansion and control that continues largely unabated in our time.

It was largely criticism of Lincoln that became the new bar, the “red line” which one could not violate that doomed Bradford (and ushered in William Bennett at the NEH instead). Since then criticism of Lincoln is not acceptable, not tolerated by mainstream conservatives. Instead, the conservative establishment now heralds such neo- Reconstructionist historians as Allen Guelzo or even Marxist Eric Foner (a favorite of Karl Rove). Any dissent from the virtual canonization of Lincoln in contemporary American society usually comes mostly from Southern traditionalists and their allies, Paleo- (or Old Right) conservatives, who are usually then dismissed or derided by the establishment Republican Party, various pundits on Fox News and the present-day “conservative movement” as reactionary know-nothings, unable to understand the natural evolution of the American republic.

Yet, beyond Lincoln’s role in unleashing the power of an omnipotent federal government, there is another aspect of Lincoln’s background that should worry
Americans—not only Southerners—just as much. It is perhaps the best guarded
confidence in American history. It certainly isn’t something that the dominant “conservative movement” wishes to acknowledge, much less see debated publicly. Yet, the factual record is there for anyone with initiative and curiosity to see for himself: Abraham Lincoln not only had a favorable opinion of Karl Marx and his writings, but was at times sympathetic to socialist policies and ideas.

A few years back (July 27, 2019) a short article by Gillian Brockell appeared in the The Washington Post. Titled, “You know who was into Karl Marx? No, not AOC. Abraham Lincoln,” the author catalogues the connections between Lincoln and Marx, and the list is—or at least should be—alarming for conservative Americans. (I acknowledge my debt to Brockell’s investigative reporting for this article.)

In his first annual message—his first State of the Union address—in December 1861 he ends the address with a peroration on what the Chicago Tribune at the time called a meditation on “capital versus labor.” “Capital is only the fruit of labor,” Lincoln elaborated, “and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Those words could have come almost directly from Karl Marx, but they were spoken by Lincoln. Fascinating, since the sixteenth president was an avid reader of the father of Marxism and corresponded with him during the War Between the States. Abraham Lincoln was not a declared socialist, certainly not in the modern sense. But Lincoln and Marx ⁠— born only nine years apart ⁠— were contemporaries. They had many mutual friends, read each other’s work, and, in 1865, exchanged letters.

During his only term in Congress during the late 1840s, Lincoln became a close
associate of New York Daily Tribune editor, Horace Greeley. It was through Greeley’s paper that the ideas and program of the nascent Republican Party were spread. And these were not just the usual anti-slavery slogans we so often hear today when we read of the formation of the party. Often those positions sounded a great deal like socialism, including proposals for the redistribution of land in the American West by the federal government to the poor and emancipated slaves.

At approximately the same moment in time, across the Atlantic Karl Marx was penning his famous text, “The Communist Manifesto” (1848). The failed revolutionary uprising in Germany had compelled Marx to take refuge in England. Hundreds of thousands of other German radicals immigrated to and took refuge in the United States, settling in places like St. Louis, Missouri, where they would play a critical role in later securing that essentially Southern state for the Union in 1861-1862. According to historian Robin Blackburn, in his volume, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln, Marx even considered immigrating and going west to Texas.

According to Blackburn Marx believed that the two most significant things happening in the world in 1860 were “the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and … the movement of the serfs in Russia.”

In 1852 Charles A. Dana, an avowed socialist and managing editor of the Daily Tribune, hired Marx to be the paper’s English correspondent. Dana had been active previously in the utopian socialist experiment Brook Farm, and he carried his vision of a workingman’s utopia with him. Marx, in exile, was a natural fit as a correspondent, and for the next decade the founder of modern communism authored 500 articles for the New York flagship paper of the Republican Party, many of them front-page editorials formally expressing the journal’s position. And like other contemporary Republicans, Lincoln constantly read the Tribune, and certainly, then, he read and digested the writings of Karl Marx. Indeed, it was the support of the German radical immigrants recently come to American shores and the Tribune that propelled Lincoln to the Republican presidential nomination in 1860.

In 1862 Dana left the Tribune, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton making him Special Commissioner for the operation of the War Department. Essentially, he became “the eyes of the Administration,” as Lincoln called him, with an inordinate influence over the conduct of the War…and over Abraham Lincoln. His opinions were received by the president as gospel, and frequently they mirrored the editorials of Tribune journalist Karl Marx.

After Lincoln’s re-election in November 1864, Marx wrote to him (January 1865) as representative of the International Workingmen’s Association, a group bringing together socialists, communists, anarchists and trade unions, to “congratulate the American people upon your reelection.” Marx continues in his communication: “…the workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working class.”

The president’s response to Marx came by way of his ambassador in London, Charles Francis Adams. Adams declared that Lincoln considered the founder of Marxism to be a “friend” and that he possessed the “sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.” The Union, Lincoln added, derived “new encouragement to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe.”

But this was not Lincoln’s only tip of the hat to revolutionary social radicalism. In 1864 he met with the New York Workingmen’s Association where he insisted that “the strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds.”

Of course, Abraham Lincoln never declared himself to be a socialist, and many of his utterances were likely politically-motivated. Yet, he certainly viewed socialists—the workingmen’s unions—as staunch allies in his war against the South. As author John Nichols in his study, The “S” Word: A Short history of American Tradition…Socialism (2015), comments about “the left leanings of founders of the Republican Party”: “…it is indisputable that the Republican Party had at its founding a red streak.”

In spite of the current historical legerdemain and outright falsification of history, Lincoln continued to be an icon of the Left after his death. In the early twentieth century Socialist Party USA leader, Eugene V. Debs, saluted Lincoln as a fellow “revolutionary.” And in the later 1930s American communists flocked to volunteer for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight, they claimed, “against fascism and Francisco Franco” in Spain’s bloody civil war.

One hundred years after Lincoln’s death, in February 1968, in an address praising communist W. E. B. Du Bois, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (reputedly a Republican, like his father) spoke in praise of Lincoln’s Marxist connection: “Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. … Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires….”

Every time, then, that a Dinesh D’Souza, Brian Kilmeade or Victor Davis Hanson on Fox News, or a representative of the Claremont Institute praises America’s sixteenth president and claims him for the conservative movement, while condemning those old “racist” Southerners, alarms should sound for genuine believers in the Framers’ Constitution.