Shall Perish From The Earth: The Crusader Nation is Dead and Gone

​My heart has ever been a parched and stony ground on which the seeds of Patriotism found no purchase. The empire’s civic rituals left me with the taste of wormwood. As a child I quietly declined to pledge allegiance to Old Glory or the “republic” for which it claimed to stand. In this, as in so much else, my father provided valuable instruction. For sixth-grade assignment I asked his favorite president. He looked up from the baseball scores (this was the era of the Big Red Machine). Millard Fillmore, he said. Why? I asked. My father stared at me for an extra beat before replying: Because he didn’t do anything.


That made no sense to my tender ears. So I tried again in 1980, the election year. The speech class teacher asked us to “endorse” a candidate: Carter, Reagan or Anderson? I had no idea, so asked my father.


He looked up from the baseball pages (by then the Reds weren’t doing so well). His jaw literally dropped. He stared at me, his head cocked slightly, like one of the dogs (we had German shepherds) puzzling out some weird noise from the TV (which was frequent: it only caught a signal if I stood on the roof and rotated the antenna).

Perhaps, in that moment, he thought he had failed as a father.


Millard Fillmore, he said finally, and went back to the league standings.


He hadn’t failed; I was merely slow.

I last exercised “the sacred duty and obligation of the citizen” in 1988 or thereabouts. A friend, back from the Army and laid off from the local plant, decided to run for some bullshit county job. I volunteered as campaign manager. His daughter drew a bunch of Vote For My Daddy! posters. I spent an afternoon hanging them in little country stores along the rural routes. To our amazement, he won. Something of a landslide, I recall. He had much to learn about public service: There ain’t but four hours of actual work in a god-damn week, he whispered to me incredulously. And they’re paying me for forty. He looked around furtively. Man, this has got to be illegal. God damn sheriff’s gonna come and impound my ass. He asked around the courthouse: what should I do? His fellow county employees looked at him with pity. Finally he figured it out, and spent those 36 “free” hours/week collecting fallen brush from the local golf course. Fridays he’d build a bonfire between holes 11 and 12 and ruminate on the Great Questions with a bottle of Wild Turkey. Sometimes I’d join him. I’d discovered Solzhenitsyn around that time (the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were on my father’s shelves, as were the Dostoevsky novels I’d discovered four years earlier) and had a sense of what the Russians endured under the Bolshevik regime. One of those Fridays (I was young and foolish, so the Wild Turkey likely helped) it struck me: we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.



That was 1988, remember. I was young and foolish; the amazing promise of American life wide open before me. But there were already strange things afoot. I had considered a scholarly sort of career: the history of ideas, the history of Christian doctrine, Russian history or literature, the sort of thing that would require multiple advanced degrees. A recruiter from an Ivy League grad school came and pitched its school’s doctoral programs. She spent forty minutes talking about “inclusive language” in the Bible; all this Mists of Avalon type shit about how the Patriarchy Oppressed Strong Women. I decided grad school was not for me and chose what was then called “white man’s welfare”: the U.S. military, in whose combat arms Southerners have until recently been overrepresented[1].



Also in 1988: the publication of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Intellectual types (my father subscribed to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, among others) touted it “the definitive history.” I was young and dumb, but I knew an “agenda” when I saw one. McPherson’s first book was a laudatory account the New England abolitionists. His second argued that Emancipation was a “second American revolution.” He’s correct there too, but not in the way he thinks.


More on McPherson in a subsequent chapter, but here’s the TL;DR. McPherson is not a historian. McPherson worked for Princeton, which is a finishing school for the empire’s missionaries. What they teach is what the empire wants you to think. McPherson is an evangelist of the Exceptional Nation, his gospel the eternal righteousness of the American state and its mandate from heaven to advance the cause of freedom by any means necessary. We will drag humanity to outer space kicking and screaming if necessary because we are Americans, it’s who we are because Lincoln. In that he merely revived and put fresh lipstick on the Holy Cause myth invented by the Republicans after the war: Father Abraham a literal prophet, leading “his people” to a New Birth of Freedom, which by necessity demanded the “terrible swift sword” of Sherman and Grant’s armies burning and looting across Georgia and Mississippi.

More on that later. In 1988 Back my primary interest – no, it was a haunting, an obsession – was “the Good War.” My father was drafted in 1942. He trained as a medic and landed at Anzio, fought up the boot of Italy, including Monte Cassino.
He had nightmares about the war sometimes. I would sit outside the bedroom door and listen. He shouted things from the war: stretcher bearers, pressure bandages, god damn it he’s gone.


He spoke only once of the war to me. I was young, maybe in my teens. I still believed much of what I was told. I said Hanson could have written: the courage and sacrifice and heroism of those young men, fighting for ideals, fighting for Freedom.


My father stared at me. It was a strange look: sadness, slight contempt - and something different, something dark that I did not and do not understand.

Finally he snorted. Bullshit, he said. Nobody thought that. It was stoic duty. Get the damn thing done. He made to say more, then stopped.

I waited. He was staring at nothing, his lips pursed, one finger tapping the table. I cleared my throat.

Incomprehensible, my father said. I can't... Then he looked at me. That dark emotion possessed him completely. I would never again see that look in his eyes. That darkness, a black fury, bottomless grief, the abandonment of hope.

What they tell you, he said. Is a lie. It's a goddam lie.



I didn’t realize it, but Providence at that moment assigned me my life purpose: I wanted to know what happened to my father. What is the goddam lie and what is it to do with what he saw in the war; who told the lie and who is repeating it.


That was thirty-seven years ago. This is where my hunt for the goddam lie led me: to my great-great-grandfather, one of General Lee’s men, a soldier of the Army of Northern Virginia who like hundreds and thousands of Southern soldiers fought with a courage and fortitude unmatched by any U.S. Army – to defend their land, the land of my fathers, my father’s land, my land, from the Americans. They fought with unmatched hopeless perhaps because they knew what America would become.


I did not vote for Trump, simply because I do not vote. I am not particularly shocked or outraged by what Musk and his lads have unearthed, and I cannot imagine I’m the only one. The internet has done horrible things, but their crimes cannot be hidden. None of it can be unseen or unheard or buried on page seven because it confirms what we already knew or at least intuited: it’s fake, it’s a fraud, it’s bullshit; the United States is a chaos agent ruled by demons.


Lincoln refounded the “republic,” his cultists claim. Indeed he did. But not as a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” As H.L. Mencken noted, the Confederates fought for self-determination. Not Abe and his conscripts. Abe sought tariffs and taxes to shift to the railroads and banks for Internal Improvements: a public-private partnership, in other words, and if 700,000 had to die, so be it. Yes, Lincoln and the Republicans gave us a “new nation” founded on radical egalitarianism and the belief that God assigned it the task of imposing it on the world at the point of the bayonet.

Dangerous Nation, in the words of Robert Kagan, one of the Kagan neocon clan that has ruled American foreign policy for at least thirty years. “A lot of what the United States wants to do is to bring what we regard as, you know, the blessings of liberty to other peoples.”



This, Kagan and the neocons claim, is what makes America “exceptional”: it, and it alone, has the prerogative of imposing its system upon the rest of the world. Another word for that is “empire.”


America did have a chance to be exceptional. The United States could have remained these United States, a loose confederation small farmers and craftsmen who would prefer to be left alone.


But Lincoln chose empire.


And for all my scathing remarks about “Americans” – I’ll explain what I mean by that in a future chapter – Americans did not want empire. Lincoln won with a minority of the vote in 1860, was reviled throughout the war and may have on in 1864 only by cheating, but was lionized ex post facto by the republicans seeking political advantage. Americans were firmly isolationist after that: majorities, featuring a coalition of poor Southern whites and Scandinavian progressives in the Midwest – opposed U.S. entry into the first world war. In 1940, a poll found that 96% of Americans had no interest in a war with Germany.


But neither Wilson nor FDR liked the sound of that. How dare these Americans decline to fight, die and suffer for our ideals! Fortunately, Lincoln was there to remind us of our duty to fight and kill people we do not know in the name of abstractions tossed about by lying politicians and ideological fanatics.


Perhaps that’s what haunted my father: the sheer volume of lies, their distortion of language, their inversions of meaning and their draining the world of beauty and truth; the way they made it a howling waste where demons now dwell.

Here’s hoping that this really is a “revolution,” as people, and not just the MAGA people, are saying. Both Trump and Vance have stated the U.S. is out of the chaos, war and murder business. That also means an end to the lies.


Defeat can be the impetus for reflection, and reflection to repentance.

For this, Trump deserves some thanks. Because he, alone of the Republicans and the political class in the “West”, had the courage to admit the obvious: Russia won.

Russia won. I’ll repeat that: Russia defeated the Americans. Russia and the United States met on the field of battle and the Americans lost. It’s true. The Ukrainian Army was an American army. Maintain the NATO fiction if you like – and enjoy it while you can -- but the Ukrainians were trained by Americans and supplied by Americans; the Americans planned their operations, the Americans fed them intelligence. Americans sent Boris Johnson to crash the peace deal Zelensky cut with Putin; American vassals like Germany chose to disregard the Minsk agreements. Every drop of blood, every grieving widow, every fatherless child, every freezing apartment block and every acre of that ruined nation: that’s you, Uncle Sam. The same as you did to us, but on a far greater scale. And let’s not even discuss Gaza yet.

The empire of the goddam lie has caused enough misery and thank God Trump stopped it.

And it’s encouraging that Trump, less than a month into his term, is seeking to repair one of the empire’s more odious lies. In 1991 James Baker III, George Bush’s secretary of state, told Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not proceed “one inch eastward.”

It only took eight years for the Americans to break Baker’s promise: NATO admitted the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary in 1999 when Clinton was president. Here he tries bullshitting his way out of it via The Atlantic. Here is a more accurate account. The neocon-dominated administration of the hapless George W. Bush first floated the jaw-droppingly stupid idea of bringing Ukraine into NATO in 2007. Obama, it appears, empowered the noxious Victoria Nuland of Team Kagan to organize the color revolution of 2014. Once Biden was installed, the neocons got their heart’s desire: death. Lindsay Graham chortled that it was a great way to “weaken” Russia; what are a few hundred thousand Ukrainian dead to us? And don’t worry about those hillbillies in western North Carolina, what about Israel?

The cynicism, nihilism and outright evil of these American exceptionalist neocons beggars belief.


Baker, born in Houston when it was still a Southern city, was a Texan of the old school. An honorable man, he understood the importance of keeping one’s word for both nations and individuals.

As do the Russians. Not that you’ll learn this at Harvard or Yale, but Russia is known for honoring its obligations, from the time of the Czars until now. As for the Americans?

The United States is notorious for breaking treaties -- wantonly, arrogantly, joyfully. Grant, after gold was discovered in the Black Hills, sent George Armstrong Custer to look around. That violated a treaty with the Sioux. Custer and the 7th paid for that at Little Big Horn. Sad! Many such cases.

Trump and Vance’s tacit admission of American duplicity and dishonesty is a most commendable first step to repairing America’s soiled image. And there’s much more that the Trump Administration can, or should, do. Especially on the domestic front.

​I’ve somewhere alluded to the “Great Compromise” or “pact” between the U.S. and the South after the war. Shelby Foote talks about it here:

The TL; didn’t watch is like this: the South agreed to say it was better that their “union” remain “indivisible.” The U.S., for its part, would graciously admit that we fought with courage in a cause we believed was just.


It took a while, but the Americans finally got around to it discarding that one. South Carolina governor and fanatical Republican warmonger Nimrata “Nikki” Haley used the tragic murder of churchgoers as an excuse to remove the Confederate battle flag from where it flew before the State House. Nikki used the “inclusion” argument. The Republicans applauded; they had a winner.


There’s no need to review what happened after the death of George Floyd; other than to note neocons like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal wrote “opinion pieces” slandering General Lee, and the Americans removed the “Reconciliation” monument from Arlington Cemetery.

Which was and is fine by me. The Americans broke the deal, and I am perfectly happy and would prefer to remain unreconciled. Just as is the case with the Russians: there’s an issue of trust and honor.

Trump in his first term refused to strip the names of Confederate generals from U.S. military (e.g., Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Bragg in North Carolina). Biden made it happen, which to be honest was fine with me. I did not want our commanders associated with the U.S.’s mercenary hordes.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans (I’m a member) is seeking to right that wrong and have made their case in a letter to Secretary of Defense Hegseth. (Their letter notes “Fort Liberty” in North Carolina — the name ironically assigned by the Americans, has been changed back to Fort Bragg. But not the Confederate general. I’ve been told the U.S. Congress passed a law banning Confederate names from military bases. Like I said, I’m fine with that. The Americans should use names more aligned with their propositions, like The Azov Battalion in Ukraine maybe, or ISIS.

But anyway. Who was it that said there’s always a “second act” in America? Or the opportunity for one? Okay, Uncle Sam. I’ll allow you an undeserved “second act.” You admitted your dishonesty to the Russians. Certainty you will do the same for us, considering we were your first conquest. Here’s my ask:

​

1. Immediate restoration of Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, which USAID-funded rent-a-mobs desecrated in 2020.
2. Immediate replacement of the Charlottesville statue of General Lee, melted down by U.S. activists;
3. The immediate return of the Reconciliation Memorial to Arlington Cemetery;
4. The Arlington Estate returned to the Lee family, and the United States pay back rent, with interest, from 1861 onward, for those portions of the estate used for the veterans of America’s wars;
5. The City of Memphis fund a proper grave memorial for General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Columbia, Tennessee after their desecration of his grave in 2017;
6. The City of Dallas restore the statue of General Lee it removed in 2017 and the Confederate War Memorial removed in 2020;
7. San Antonio restore the Confederate monument it removed from Travis Park in 2017;
8. Houston restore the statue of Col. Richard Dowling it removed in 2020; and with regard to the Texas cities, a public apology from Governor Greg Abbott. He, like too many Texans in those cities, has too much of the Bushie carpetbagger and thinks like the Chamber of Commerce;
9. The City of New Orleans restore Lee Circle and the Beauregard monument;
10. David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal and Ty Seidule publicly stripped of rank and decorations, dishonorably discharged and pensions revoked; they will become employees of the National Park Service and serve as janitors at the tomb of U.S. Grant.

​The mayors and governing assemblies who approved these desecrations will fund the restorations from their own pockets. Liens will be attached to the entirety of their personal estates until the restorations are complete and all damages paid. Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia who spearheaded the destruction, will bear responsibility for the entirety of Monument Avenue; if any remains of his estate, it will be used to restore other monuments destroyed during his governorship.

​
So there’s your beginning. When you’re done, come back for another ten. This isn’t going to be easy. Repentance never is. The damage you’ve done is great. We want it all restored. Everything.

Notes

[1] The South, alas, remains the “most patriotic” region of America, to the considerable discomfort of the Lincoln cult: it needs us, even as it dismisses our folks as the “slave power.” Michael Anton, a theologian at the Claremont Institute, in his most recent book spent several tedious pages explaining why the South should nonetheless support their wretched nation. I will do my damndest to make sure that doesn’t happen.