Friday, March 26, 2010
Why learning History is Important
When I was a kid, I sure could not appreciate the importance of learning History. After all, it was old stuff that had already happened. I was more interested in the "new" stuff. The value of history is wasted on youth. We never realized that life is a circle and although times, clothes, appliances, transportation and a vast array of other "things" change, the minds and hearts of men do not. There is always the urge to suppress, rule, dictate and totally control the masses.
I believe we are at a crossroad right now. Over the years our federal government has grown into something the framers of the Constitution were very concerned about avoiding. Slowly, one small Constitutional perversion at a time, the federal government has violated the limitations placed upon it by the enumerated powers listed in the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. And, as we all know, the more a thief steals unabated, the more brazen he becomes.
Today we are faced with a Marxist/Socialist as president and two chambers of Congress dominated by leftist "progressive" democrats. The mandates and imposed sanctions for a failure to comply are now law, as evidenced in the latest "Health Care Reform" bill. Sadly, this is only the beginning of the Obamanation and if we, as a nation, do not realize that our liberty and freedoms are at stake, we will soon lose them.
I have listed many of my favorite quotes below. They are from very different eras and very different people. However, they all warn of the same thing. Read these...I mean REALLY read these words and take the time to think about them. As you are thinking, watch your children play and think of your responsibility to assure their freedom, security and liberty in the future.
In the military, there is an old slogan, "You fight like you train." If you are unwilling to take action to protect your liberties now by legal, politically active means; when your liberty is finally taken away you will surely not have the will to fight to get it back.
History is unfolding right in front of your face right now. Will you simply stand there and watch as Lady Liberty is raped at your feet? Will you look the other way as Uncle Sam is pummeled by leftist members of Congress that are pushing a statist agenda? Are you a "moderate" live and let live kind of person? If you are any of the aforementioned, you do not deserve the God given liberties bestowed upon you. Our liberty is not the fruit of "moderate" forefathers. The Founding Fathers of this country were not "moderate" by any means. They risked their lives and property to create a country free of the bonds of an oppressive government.
Well, the free ride is over and now we must face the enemy of freedom that is no longer at the gate. The enemy is in the White House, in the chambers of Congress and in the Attorney General's office.
***********************************************************************
"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle!
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." -Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." -Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857.
"There are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off: these are the men who never become tamed under subjection and who always, like Ulysses on land and sea constantly seeking the smoke of his chimney, cannot prevent themselves from peering about for their natural privileges and from remembering their ancestors and their former ways.
"These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised." - Etienne de La Boetie, in "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude", 1548.
"These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised." - Etienne de La Boetie, in "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude", 1548.
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States." - Noah Webster.
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." -Ayn Rand
"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery." -Thomas Jefferson.
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear." -Marcus Tullius Cicero, 42 BC.
"Human nature is full of riddles; one of those riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste of freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. -Samuel Adams.
“Tyranny is the exercise of Power beyond Right, which no Body can have a Right to. And this is making use of the Power any one has in his hands; not for the good of those, who are under it, but for his own private separate Advantage. ... For where-ever the Power that is put in any hands for the Government of the People, and the Preservation of their Properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the Arbitrary and Irregular Commands of those that have it: There it presently becomes Tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many.” - John Locke Two Treatise of Government (1698) Book II, Chapter XVIII, § 199.
"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." - William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice.
"If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; And the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers; And this is the tendency of all human governments.
A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." -Thomas Jefferson.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." - James Madison, Federalist Papers No. 47.
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
I see right through your thin disguise,
your alligator tears, and your crooked smiles.
You bite with stolen teeth; speak in false tongues,
indoctrinate people when they are young,
with the lie that crawls out of your mouth:
I, The State, am The People.
You say "there's nothing greater than I,
the ordering finger of God, am I."
You roar and the sheep kneel.
But you can't affect anyone who feels
the lie that crawls out of your mouth:
I, The State, am The People.
I see right through your thin disguise,
your alligator tears, and your crooked smiles.
You bite with stolen teeth; speak in false tongues,
indoctrinate people when they are young,
with the lie that crawls out of your mouth:
I, The State, am The People.
You say "there's nothing greater than I,
the ordering finger of God, am I."
You roar and the sheep kneel.
But you can't affect anyone who feels
the lie that crawls out of your mouth:
I, The State, am The People.
Somewhere there are still peoples, and herds.
But where we live, we live among turds.
You mean the death of those who believe,
who fail to realise, who fail to perceive,
the lie that crawls out of your mouth:
I, The State, am The People.
END.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment