America lost its mind 146 years ago and hasn’t been the same since. Or rather, it’s been a different country ever since.
A psychotic, self-referential, duplicitous country – largely ignorant of its own history and convinced of its messianic role in word affairs. A country not merely content to live – and let live. But one determined to to force others – everyone – to live its way.
At bayonet point, if need be,
It all goes back to the events of 1861-1865. The struggle for Southern independence, which the modern histories dishonestly – not merely mistakenly – call the “Civil War.”
Which it was not.
The Southern states had no desire to dominate the Northern states, nor to control the government of the North. (Which is what the “federal” government had become by 1861, as the Northern states and Northern corporatist cartels controlled it; Lincoln was the front man for these corporatist interests – a shyster lawyer and born grifter who would do anything – to anyone – in the service of his paymasters.)
No, the Southern states simply wished to exercise that right which the American colonists themselves had exercised in 1776 (and which some Northern states had themselves threatened to exercise on prior occasions, for similar reasons). The right to withdraw from the voluntary union entered into by each sovereign state at the time of the ratification of the federal Constitution. The motives were no different – and no less honorable or legitimate: The Southern states, like the American colonies, had come to regard the central authority as distant, unrepresentative and increasingly tyrannical. It no longer served their interests. It no longer represented them. And to paraphrase the author of the original Declaration of Independence, when a government no longer operates in the best interests of the people as they see those interests; when it no longer represents them; and when its actions evince a systematic effort to subjugate them, when other remedies have not proved fruitful, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government – and start over.
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“She saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.”
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
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