Saturday, August 20, 2011

Civil War

"As I walked through the ruins of mighty Rome, I saw not only what 2,000 years has done to them, but what 2,000 more years will do to us. What is left of mighty Rome, is a glimpse into our own mortality." -- Ruins of Rome.



What a terrible thing, Brother, is a civil war. One week your dominion is at peace, the enemy on all borders has been subdued, the army is draining marshes for farmland and repairing fortifications, the Emperor is satisfied, and the Church is expanding; then with one fell blow, one ill-advised order from on high, all is a shambles. One's life is uprooted and overturned, the Empire is on the brink of Schism, and death is all around. One week, within which one day was the turning point, though I would be hard-pressed to determine precisely which day that was, as all seem to run together in an evil blur; and within that day a critical hour, minute, and second. Before which point, if the fatal order had not been issued, all would have remained the same; after which infinitesimal lapse, all is lost, or gained, depending upon the side you are on, and on that side, depending upon whether you are a general who will be allowed to retire peacefully to an estate in Pannonia, or a mud-booted infantryman, in which case it hardly matters on which side you fight, for the end result will be the same either way, and the twenty years service in exchange for retirement, a thick-armed barbarian wife, and two acres of bottomland for a garden are as impossible as Perseus' flight to the sun. A week is all it takes, Brother, for God to create the universe, for civil war to erupt, for a plot of beans to sprout in the summer. A day is all that is needed to watch the gladiator battles in the circus, for a baby to be born. An hour to attend a Communion service, or for that same baby to die. A minute to tell a joke, to say a prayer, to ask forgiveness, to utter a betrayal. A second for a wasp to sting, for an archer to loose an arrow, for a murderer -- or an Emperor -- to snuff out a life. Yet that insignificant period of time is impossible to predict in advance, or its inexorable progress to be stopped, and despite every good intent, that which God has decreed is made manifest, and the wasp stings, and the war erupts. -- Michael Curtis Ford, Gods and Legions, pp 277-278.


The Roman tourist whose quote I began this post with is wrong. It will not take 2,000 years for the fall of the United States or, indeed, of Western Civilization. It could happen in 2. The house of cards, so recklessly crafted out of greed and arrogance in the 20th and early 21st Century, is held in place by gravity alone, needing only the first puff of inclement wind to collapse it.

Thomas à Kempis, writing in 1418 in his work The Imitation of Christ, observed: "O quam cito transit gloria mundi." "How quickly the glory of the world passes away."

Indeed.

Responding to Patrice Lewis' proposal to divide up the country and let the collectivists have their dysfunctional portion, I wrote at the end of July:

Wishful thinking at its worst. The collectivists, being collectivists, will not give up power over ALL of us short of war. For my part, I am unwilling to cede one square inch of our nation to these tyrants without a fight. THEY are the revolutionaries, Gramscian though they may be. We simply want our liberty back under the Founders' Constitutional principles. We therefore represent Restoration, and they revolution.

There is no case in history that I know of where one country has peaceably agreed to dissolve into ideologically opposite parts. There was ALWAYS a bloody civil war. To the extent that we believe that civil war cannot happen here, decisions will be taken on both sides that make it inevitable.

Do the problems exist as you delineate them? Certainly. Can they be solved politically, without violence? Certainly not. The sooner we all embrace that unfortunate truth, the more ready we will be when it happens.

I do not wish civil war. Only an insane person would. I have done all I can to warn people of its likelihood. But know this, it IS coming, whether we like it or not.

I pray daily to God to prevent it, but I rather think this may be the punishment we deserve for turning our faces from Him.

As George Mason warned his fellow Founders when they refused to give up slavery as part of the Constitution, nations are not judged in Heaven, but on earth. He predicted that as a country we would be bloodily judged for slavery, and we were.

There's another judgment coming.

No amount of wishful thinking or facile political propositions will prevent it.


The Gunwalker Scandal, even if carried to a successful conclusion, can, I think, but buy time, years, a decade perhaps, depending upon economic events. And time is important, vitally important, don't get me wrong. But we have a fundamental divide in this country over which is to be the master of which, the people or the federal government.

Such divides in the past have not been bridged except by filling them up with the bodies of countless millions, of the guilty and the innocent.

May God have mercy on my country and its people and spare us the bloody agony of civil war.

I rather suspect, however, that He won't.

Not this time.

I doubt our ruins will look at magnificent as those of Rome.

"Sic transit gloria mundi."

"Thus passes the glory of the world."

But whoever first said it left out, "in blood, agony and fire."

12 comments:

Dennis308 said...

Regretfully, I think yor right.
God help us.

Dennis
III
Texas

Anonymous said...

"There is no case in history that I know of where one country has peaceably agreed to dissolve into ideologically opposite parts."

There are cases of peaceable separation along ethnic lines, however. On 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, so perhaps something similar can be done here.

Segregation is preferable to watching your friends die in battle.

MALTHUS

WV: dosed--the punchbowl was dosed with the poison of class warfare and everyone has been made sick by it.

Anonymous said...

"The house of cards, so recklessly crafted out of greed and arrogance in the 20th and early 21st Century. . . ."

Many of us take it back to the 19th.

Anonymous said...

One alarming parallel between the Roman collapse and our current state is the unsustainable feedback relationship which developed between career politicians who got themselves repeatedly re-elected by promising goodies from the state to those who's votes they wanted, and those voters who were able to sustain themselves on those goodies while doing little or nothing to earn their keep other than voting for the politicians who provided the goodies they desired.

Old NFO said...

Hope you're wrong, don't think you are... sigh...

drjim said...

una tormenta está viniendo

I know, kid....

Anonymous said...

Sadly, I feel the same.

My the Great Creator bless us, this Remnant, for we have his work still to do.

Pickdog
III

Anonymous said...

Sorry but Gunwalker is not even a side distraction. I don't think it will have more than a very small impact on DC or what is going on.

The die is set. What will be is going to happen in Gods own time. This country will divide there is no other way. The views are to distant and there is less and less middle ground every day. Resources are shrinking, and social cohesion is bending and will soon snap.

s4r

Anonymous said...

When the fecal matter does finally find it's way into the rotary oscillator, those of us who were wishing it would happen sooner will wish we had just another month, another week, or even just one day to prepare.

Today is that extra day.
This week is that extra week.
This month is that extra month.

Use it wisely and pray each night for one more day and the wisdom to use it most prudently.

Anonymous said...

There will be no division because these a**holes want it all. Everything. This is us or them. Freedom or slavery. It's that simple.

They have already declared war and their judges have upheld them in it's prosecution. The media agrees and supports all of it and all of the actors involved.

Submit or fight because those are the options they are giving you. If you sumit, you condenm your children to that fate as well.

Clear enough?

Grog said...

I wouldn't be surprised if there were 4 or 5 "sections", due to the level of division that is in place now in our "modern society".

But if that happens, the fracas will get worse before it gets better, because the other "sections" will want what we have. And I can only partially form a mental picture of how ugly that could be, the experience of living it will have to be accepted.

I don't have any guilt in thinking there will be a lot of people who won't survive if this goes to worst-case, that's just the reality of what could be.

Grog
III

Anonymous said...

Interesting thoughts on possible breakup scenario's are considered in (but not the main focus of):

"Warday" -- Streiber & Kunetka (1984)

The "Vampire Earth" series by E. E. Knight