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According to a New York Times article by By Jack Healy and Adam Liptak, the Supreme Court on Thursday of last week ruled that much of eastern Oklahoma falls within an Indian reservation.

The 5-to-4 decision, potentially one of the most consequential legal victories for Native Americans in decades, could have far-reaching implications for the people who live in what the court affirmed was Indian Country.

The lands include much of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s second-biggest city.

The case was steeped in the United States government’s long history of brutal removals and broken treaties with Indian tribes, and struggled with whether lands of the Creek Nation had remained a reservation after Oklahoma became a state.

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that much of eastern Oklahoma falls within an Indian reservation. The Supreme Court decided that some eastern Oklahoma land controlled by state and local governments since 1907 — including Tulsa — should still be under the jurisdiction of the Creeks because Congress never disestablished the tribe’s 1866 reservation.

The state of Oklahoma contends Congress took several steps intended to dissolve the reservation even though there was never any explicit statute.

The decision puts in doubt hundreds of state convictions of Native Americans and could change the handling of prosecutions across a vast swath of the state.

Lawyers were also examining whether it had broader implications for taxing, zoning and other government functions.

However,  many of the specific impacts will now be determined by negotiations between state and federal authorities and five Native American tribes in Oklahoma.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a Westerner who has sided with tribes in previous cases and joined the court’s more liberal members to form the majority, said that Congress had granted the Creek a reservation, and that the United States needed to abide by its promises.

In McGirt v. Oklahoma, the court ruled, 5 to 4, that much of eastern Oklahoma is an Indian reservation.

McGirt was convicted of first-degree rape of a 4-year-old girl in 1996 in Wagoner County.

He contends he should have been tried in federal district court because he is a tribal member, the crimes occurred on the historical Creek reservation, and the reservation was never disestablished.

Creek leaders hailed the decision as a hard-fought victory that clarified the status of their lands. The tribe said it would work with state and federal law enforcement authorities to coordinate public safety within the reservation.

“This is a historic day,” Principal Chief David Hill said in an interview. “This is amazing. It’s never too late to make things right.”

The ruling comes at an extraordinary time for Native Americans.

They are being ravaged by the coronavirus both in the soaring numbers of cases and deaths and the economic distress caused by closed casinos.

But at the same moment, the nationwide movement to confront systemic racism has brought new energy and attention to generations-long fights by tribal nations and Indigenous activists over land, treaty rights and discrimination.

In the past few weeks, tribal activists garnered international attention after they blocked the roads outside Mount Rushmore to condemn President Trump’s visit to what they called stolen lands. They won a fight to shut down an oil pipeline that crossed sacred ground in North Dakota.

In the face of growing pressure from corporate sponsors, the Washington Redskins of the N.F.L. recently promised to re-evaluate their team name, which activists have denounced for years as racist.

On social media, people celebrated Thursday’s decision with the declaration Native Lives Matter.

The court’s decision means that Indigenous people who commit crimes on the eastern Oklahoma reservation, which includes much of Tulsa, cannot be prosecuted by state or local law enforcement, and must instead face justice in tribal or federal courts.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. warned in a dissenting opinion that the court’s decision would wreak havoc and confusion on Oklahoma’s criminal justice system.

“The state’s ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hobbled and decades of past convictions could well be thrown out,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “On top of that, the court has profoundly destabilized the governance of eastern Oklahoma.”

But experts in Indian law said the decision’s effects would be more muted, and would change little for non-Natives who live in the three-million-acre swath of Oklahoma that the court declared to be a reservation of the Creek Nation.

“Not one inch of land changed hands today,” said the ambassador for the Creek Nation. “All that happened was clarity was brought to potential prosecutions within the Creek Nation.”

In a statement, Mike Hunter, Oklahoma’s attorney general, said the state and the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole Nations were working on an agreement to present to Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice addressing jurisdictional issues raised by the decision.

Still, the decision could have far-reaching implications on tribes beyond the reservation boundaries in eastern Oklahoma.

The case sprang from the state-level criminal conviction of Jimcy McGirt, a Seminole man who was found guilty of sex crimes that occurred within the Creek Nation’s historical boundaries. He said that only federal authorities were entitled to prosecute him.

Mr. McGirt argued that Congress had created the reservation and had never clearly destroyed the sovereignty of the Creek Nation over the area, even as much of the land was parceled off to private ownership.

Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, tracing that history, began: “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise.” The reference is to the forced relocation of some 100,000 Native Americans from their home in the Southeast in the 1800s.

The opinion said that the promise was that Congress had guaranteed the Creek land for a permanent home in what became Oklahoma in exchange for forcing them from their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama during the 1830s.

The court was faced with the question of whether lands of the Creek Nation had remained a reservation after Oklahoma became a state and the tribe’s lands were fractured and sold off and its powers of self-governance were attacked by Congress.

Well obviously, we need a little history here, so here goes.

Americans came to the west with the idea that they did so peacefully and that they were inhabiting an empty land.

The Indians did not see it as peaceful and the Indians did not give up their lands without a fight

Europeans had been in contact with Indians for several centuries before the great migration west. In many cases the early Europeans worked alongside and traded with the Indians.

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set forth on their great expedition in 1804, they lived among the Indians the encountered along the way.

This gave the explorers a working knowledge of the Indian’s cultures and politics

Lewis and Clark came west seeking Indian allies against rival European powers and to establish trade relations with the Indians.

Americans treated Indian tribes as small nations existing within the boundaries of the US.

The US took the position that since these nations were within our nation, we had a right to control over Indian affairs and sole authority to purchase Indian lands.

However, Indian nations were sovereign nations and as such felt they had full control over their people.

In other words, they were a third form of government in the US.

The federal government, the state government, and the Indian government.

All of the early 19^th century presidents had tried to get the Indians to leave the east and move to lands west of the Mississippi.

The Indians refused to do so.

So, in order to end the resistance, President Andrew Jackson allowed Georgia and neighboring states to extend their laws over the Indian nations living in their states.

This new arrangement affected the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and the Cherokees. (known as the five civilized tribes).

Naturally the Indians resisted state rule and eventually the issue came before the supreme court.

The supreme court ruled that Indian tribes are domestic dependent nations and are exempt from state laws.

By domestic dependent nations they meant that Indians gave up their ability to establish independent dealings with foreign nations when they came under the “protection of the US.

The court did say however that the Indians retained their internal powers and that Georgia laws did not apply to them

So, the supreme court was saying that Indian tribes were independent nations.

Andrew Jackson chose to simply ignore the Supreme Court ruling and twist it to his advantage.

He and his followers stated that because the Indians depended on the U.S. to protect their rights they had surrendered certain aspects of their sovereignty.

In other words, Indian nations were wards of the federal government just like parents and their children.

So Jackson and his followers took the stand that removal of the Indians from the east and shipping them west was in the Indians’ best interest.

There, they could continue their independence without white interference (a real crock).

This led to the Trail of Tears which forced the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from the east to Oklahoma.

Along the trail, one out of every eight Indians died.

Andrew Jackson stated that Indians had “neither the intelligence, industry, moral habits, or desire for improvement, to live among whites”

In 1832 Congress authorized the creation of the office of Commissioner of Indian affairs and Jackson named Thomas McKinney, a supporter of removal, as commissioner.

In 1834 congress went on to create the Bureau of Indian affairs.

Indians soon found they had no choice but to give up their lands and by 1870 only the Indian territory given to the 5 civilized tribes remained within total Indian control.

Reservations were developed as needed and separated the races.

In effect they were small concentration camps supervised by troops where Indians were subjected to a system of discipline and instruction.

Indians were now treated as powerless wards of the state.

Those in favor of the reservation system argued that reservations would teach Indians our way of life so they could be acclimated back into society.

Indians would be made into Christian farmers, in nuclear families living a “proper life”.

Above all else, Indians were to be individualized and de-tribalized.

The reservation system was based on treaties signed by the chiefs but in many cases the U.S. simply appointed a chief from the tribe who was willing to negotiate.

The 1850’sand 1860’s saw tremendous violence between the Indians and the U.S. govt.

During the 1850’s and 1860’s the eastern protestant churches pushed for an end to the atrocities being committed on the Indian people.

Bishop Henry Whipple of the Episcopal church was one of the first reformers to dominate American Indian policy after the civil war.

He was convinced that the only way the Indians could survive would be their rapid adoption of Christianity and anglo-american culture

Whipple’s followers called themselves friends of the indians and argued that Indians were inferior to whites not because of their capacity to learn, but because they were like children-they were still advancing up the ladder of civilization.

Therefore, reformers believed that for Indians to survive, they had to shed everything that made them Indian.

If the Indians refused, reformers would have to force them to do so for their own good

Indian culture was to be destroyed in order to save the indian people

Reformers sincerely believed this was a policy of kindness, honesty, and justice

In opposition to this reform movement were those who wanted to give the army total control over Indian affairs.

Reformers staved off army control but the army continued to kill Indians.

Indians were now seen as  incompetent children for whom the government was responsible.

Most Indians on reservations now depended on government payments and rations for their survival

This dependency gave the government absolute  control  over the Indians

Between 1881 and 1897 the bureau of Indian affairs doubled in size with nearly 4000 employees.

The bureau now became centralized under the leadership of Carl Schurz, Secretary of the interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes.

The Indian bureau now launched a direct assault on Indian culture by withholding rations, imprisonment, forcibly cutting men’s hair, seizing children for schools, physically breaking up religious ceremonies, and seizing religious objects.

Reformers believed that until they eliminated existing indian beliefs, they could not assimilate Indians into society

Reformers stated that  “the goal is to kill the Indian and save the man”

The reformers now also pushed for a program which would take Indian lands and convert them to private property.

The reformers believed that as long as Indian lands were held as common property, Indians would continue with their tribal customs

Also, as Indian populations declined, the reformers felt that the Indians held too much land for them to function efficiently.

Therefore, the reformers now pushed through programs which would take this “excess land” and sell it to white settlers.

This brings us full circle back to the recent Supreme Court decision we started this show with.

This process the government used was known as “severalty” (ie severe the land from the reservation)

The main severalty measure was the Dawes Act,  submitted by Senator Henry Dawes of Mass. in 1887.

Under the Dawes Act, Indian lands would be divided up and each Indian head of family was to get 160 acres which would be held in a trust by the government for 25 years.

The decision to divide up Indian lands rested with the President of the US, not the Indians.

If the President decided to divide up a reservation and sell off the excess, there was nothing the Indians could do about it

In 1881 Indians held 155,623,312 acres of land.

In just 9 years, 1890, they held 104,314,349 (51 million acres lost)

By 1900 the figure was 77,865,373 (half of all Indian lands)

Fraud had allowed most of this land to fall into white hands

Between 1887 and 1934, the Indians lost another 66 percent of their allotted lands.

The only exception to the Dawes Act was that of the 5 civilized tribes of Oklahoma who obtained an exemption from the act.

Settlers now wanted the Oklahoma territory and pushed for severalty of the 5 civilized tribe’s land holdings.

In 1893, the Dawes Commission ruled in favor of severalty of the civilized tribe’s lands.

When the Indians resisted, congress passed the Curtis Act of 1898 which unilaterally terminated all tribal governments in the United States.

In 1903 the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had absolute power to regulate Indian affairs even when congressional actions violated existing treaty provisions.

Do you now see the significance of last Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court?

The problem was, these Indians had successfully set up a community in which every Indian had a home of his own, and  there were no paupers in the nation.

These Indians owed no one, had built a capitol, schools, and hospitals.

With no problems to point to, reformers now used the Indians’ success against them.

Reformers contended that the Indians, while successful, had gone as far as they could go because they owned land in common.

There was no reason to make your home better than that of your neighbor.

There was no selfishness (competition) in the Indian society which reformers felt was the root of advanced civilization.

Bottom line, reformers felt that civilization was based on selfishness and that progress comes only through uninhibited pursuit of self interest.

Indians were not inferior, they were simply living in a society which inhibited the greed and selfishness necessary for progress!

I don’t know. Callers, what do you think. Maybe the Indians had a better model for society and we should just put them in control. They can’t do any worse than the mess we have now created in our country.

 

As we discussed in last week’s show, Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” was published in 1651. Hobbes viewed the state of nature as one of war “of every man, against every man.”

He believed that in this natural state, no government control, “(E)very man has a Right to every thing and that a man’s life under these conditions, would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Now an opposing view was published by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government in 1690. He viewed the state of nature quite differently from Hobbes.

Locke believed that the state of nature was not one of continual war; rather, there is natural law “which obliges every one” not “to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”

Locke continued, however saying, “Enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very insecure.” This explains why men would willingly leave the state of nature to join a political society.

“The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.”

Locke believed that even in the state of nature an individual could own property — in other words, property rights pre-exist government; they are not merely a grant of government.

In a natural state, man has a sole right to his own person and shares a right to all resources, but in applying his labor, he could convert common resources into his private property.

“Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labor something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others.”

Thus, “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property.” This improved land actually benefits society since cultivated land is much more productive than land “lying waste in common.”

The creation of this property eventually allowed for exchange. As Locke noted, a farmer could trade plums for nuts and nuts for a piece of metal, or sheep for shells and wool for a diamond.

The desire for profit was a powerful motivator to make man improve his condition and thereby mankind’s in general.

Locke believed that when a man in the state of nature joined society he did so “the better to preserve himself, his liberty and property.

Ok. Wait a minute. Let’s look at that.

Remember how last week I said our forefathers had a history? That they didn’t create our government in a vacuum and that they were all well read?

You guessed it. Our forefathers had all read the teachings of not only Thomas Hobbes, but also those of John Locke.

So back to what we just said. John Locke believed that when a man in the state of nature joined society he did so “the better to preserve himself, his liberty and property.

In other words, the protection of life, liberty, and property. See where our forefathers got it? From a book written in 1690.

Locke went on to say he rejected Hobbes concept of an absolute sovereign; specifically, Locke repeatedly indicated that the government, no matter how constituted, could not take an individual’s property without his consent.

He accepted the concept of taxation, but only as a proportional share necessary to maintain government. Locke’s sovereign could be challenged by the people, and the people maintained the right to overthrow a tyrannical government, again,  something we included in our Declaration of Independence.

In sum, Locke believed that we all have certain inalienable rights and that these include rights over the physical goods and realty that constitute our property. Again, these rights exist with or without government, and government’s job is to make this property more, not less, secure.

Our nation’s founders clearly chose Locke over Hobbes.

So who was the John Locke guy?

John Locke (1632–1704)  was born shortly before the English Civil War. Remember the civil war where our forefather’s grandparents overthrew their king and cut his head off?

Locke studied science and medicine at Oxford University and became a professor there.

He sided with the Protestant Parliament against the English King James II. This civil war once and for all reduced the power of the king and made Parliament the major authority in English government.

In 1690, Locke published his Two Treatises of Government. He generally agreed with Hobbes about the brutality of the state of nature. He also agreed that a social contract was needed to assure peace.

However, he disagreed with Hobbes on two major points.

First, as I said, Locke argued that natural rights such as life, liberty, and property existed in the state of nature ( before established government existed).

He believed they could never be taken away or even voluntarily given up by individuals. These rights were “inalienable” (impossible to surrender).

Locke also disagreed with Hobbes about the social contract. For him, it was not just an agreement among the people, but between them and the sovereign (preferably a king).

According to Locke, the natural rights of individuals limited the power of the king. The king did not hold absolute power, as Hobbes had said.

Locke believed that the king acted only to enforce and protect the natural rights of the people. If a sovereign violated these rights, the social contract was broken.

If this happened, the people had the right to revolt and establish a new government.

Less than 100 years after Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government, Thomas Jefferson used Locke’s teachings in writing the Declaration of Independence.

Locke spoke out for freedom of thought, speech, and religion. But, he believed property to be the most important natural right.

He declared that owners may do whatever they want with their property as long as they do not invade the rights of others.

Government, he said, was mainly necessary to promote the public good. This meant protecting property, encouraging commerce, and little else.

A little different than what we suffer under today.

“Govern lightly,” Locke said. What do you think he would say about our current federal government?

Locke favored a representative government such as the English Parliament. It had two chambers. The House of Lords was made up of noblemen, who inherited their positions. The House of Commons was made up of members elected by voters. But he wanted representatives to be only men of property and business.

Only adult male property owners, he believed, should have the right to vote.

Locke was reluctant to allow the mass of people without property to vote or serve in government. He believed that they were unfit.

The supreme authority of government, Locke said, should reside in the law-making legislature, like England’s Parliament. The prime minister and courts should be creations of the legislature and under its authority.

So, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes were both known as social contract theorists as well as natural law theorists.

However, we can see that they are both completely different in terms of their stand and conclusions in several laws of nature.

Hobbes was the champion of absolute power for the sovereign, but greatly contributed to many other subjects as well, including ethics, geometry, physics of gases, theology, and even political science.

John Locke, on the other hand, has been coined the father of liberalism. He was one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers and proved to be a great English philosopher and physician.

He greatly contributed to the American Declaration of Independence, focusing on the concept of creating a republic.

John Locke obtained his education at Westminster School in London. Once he finished his studies there, he was accepted to Christ Church, Oxford.

However, he wasn’t pleased with the university’s undergraduate program and took an interest in medicine and was able to obtain a bachelor’s degree in medicine at Oxford.

Both Locke and Hobbes had varying stands on different issues.

According to Locke, man is by nature a social animal. Hobbes, however, thought otherwise. He didn’t consider man a social animal; he thought that a society would not even exist in a state of nature.

When it came to the issue of the state of nature, Locke believed that in that state, men are usually true to their word and fulfill their obligations.

Hobbes, on the other hand, made his stand on the state of nature perfectly clear when he said that there is no society that doesn’t have the continual fear and danger of a violent death.

Furthermore, the stand on the social contract is different in Locke and Hobbes’ philosophies.

Locke believed that we have the right to life as well as the right to just and impartial protection of our property. Any violation of the social contract would put one in a state of war with his fellow countrymen.

Conversely, Hobbes believed that if you simply do what you are told, you are safe. You will not violate the social contract because you do not have the right to rebel.

So let’s take a final look at the teachings of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes now knowing that our forefathers sat down following the American Revolution and called upon the thoughts of these two men to create the government of the United States.

1. Locke and Hobbes both believed in social contracts and natural law.

 

2. Regarding human nature – according to Locke, that man is a social animal. According to Hobbes, man isn’t a social animal.
3. Regarding the state of nature (a world with no government or laws) Locke belived man is true to his obligations and words. According to Hobbes, the life of a man would be poor and brutal in a society with continuous fear and danger.
4. Regarding the social contract – according to Locke, man has the right to life and just and impartial protection. According to Hobbes, if man simply does what he is told, he is safe.

So folks, let me ask you. As we watch the evening news and hear the demands of these radical groups, what exactly do they want?

The nation of CHAD (Seattle Capitol Hill Autonomous District) presented a list of demands including everything from reparations to free college and health care for all.

Now the Black Lives Matter movement is asking for, among other things, reparations for what they say are past and continuing harms to African-Americans, an end to the death penalty, legislation to acknowledge the effects of slavery, as well as investments in education initiatives, mental health services and jobs programs.

Now I am not going to get into the demands of these groups or whether they are right or wrong. The big issue is, and has been since the dawn of time, once you win a revolution, now what do you do?

Recently a black militia group in Georgia stated, “The solution is very simple, We file a declaration of liberation, declaring every African-American descendant of slavery a political prisoner here in the United States, that was affected by the Portuguese slave trade, and after that, the United States then has a choice, either carve us a piece of land out here — we’ll take Texas — and let us do our own thing, or don’t stop us when we exit this body here and go somewhere where they will give us our own land to build our own nation.”

So I ask, what type of government will they form in Texas or this new land and how can it be sustained?

Are they willing to look upon the teachings of the past and create a new government from scratch like our forefathers did?

If so, who are their Thomas Jeffersons and James Madisons?

Have they simply been caught up in the media frenzy to topple statues and chant slogans without thinking about the future?

Many people supported the idea of letting the Country of CHAZ continue to exist and implode from within (which it did).

Many as well say go ahead and let Minneapolis and New York defund their police and watch what happens next.

Thomas Hobbes was a seventeenth-century English philosopher, who believed in a very powerful government.

HIs most famous book was “Leviathan”, where he stated that humans were naturally greedy, angry, and criminal humans.

According to Hobbes, all societies needed a form of authorities to control these people and prevent them from going crazy basically.

According to Hobbes, this problem could be solved by entering into what is called a social contract.

In the Enlightenment, this meant giving up your freedom and power to a government or King in order to protect your basic rights and safety.

Thomas Hobbes also insisted on the need for the law and a higher justice. Without some form of law or judgment, the world would just do whatever they wanted.

So, when we talk about doing away with police, Hobbes saw, all the way back in the 1600’s what would happen without law and order.

Basically, Hobbes was telling us that all the social contract theory says is that, if we are part of a social contract, then we’re morally bound to give up our liberty to enforce laws, and the government that is given that authority is legitimate.

Our American government is a product of numerous Enlightenment thinkers, who thrived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Thomas Hobbes was one of them. While some of Hobbes’ ideas were contrary to American governing principles — like his belief in absolute power over a government’s subjects — many were consistent with the ideas presented in the country’s founding documents.

While many of his ideas on social contracts, equality and natural liberties inspired the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, others were not truly integrated into the U.S. philosophy of government until after the Civil War.

When Hobbes imagined what life would be like without government, he concluded it would be “nasty, brutish, and short.”

He envisioned individuals constantly vying with each other for their own self-interest and attacking others in pursuit of those interests.

Now I ask you, does this not perfectly describe what we are seeing on the evening news taking place right now in major cities across the US?

From this pessimistic view comes a foundation of American government rooted in Hobbes theory: the social compact.

Hobbes believed that to enforce law and prevent the chaos of the state of nature, people consented to forming a government.

This idea is written into the preamble of the U.S. Constitution, when “We the People” establish a government to do things like “ensure domestic tranquility” and “promote the general welfare.”

When the Declaration of Independence was written, it specified that “all men are created equal, and endowed… with certain unalienable rights.”

While this idea also comes from the philosopher John Locke, who I plan on discussing in next week’s show, Thomas Hobbes contributed significantly to the idea of natural liberties as well.

Hobbes believed that all subjects of a government had the right to defend themselves against, and even overthrow, a government that no longer supported them.

This, of course, is the main idea behind the Declaration of Independence and the establishment of the United States.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution, which states that a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, supports a Hobbes’s view on self-defense.

Now here is something important to remember. Our forefathers did not create our government in a vacuum. Every one of them was very well read. They all came to the table knowing their history.

So when they sat down to “form a more perfect  Union”, they did so by referring to the writings and teachings of the great minds who came before them.

Think about this. At the time, We were the only people in the world with the opportunity to form a new government from scratch.

Prior to this, the rulers either inherited the job of being a King, Queen, Emperor, or Czar or they conquered a neighbor and transferred their government to the new land.

We took all of the best ideas for governing at that time, and created something entirely new. A Federal Republic.

People were shocked when they saw what our forefathers had come up with. Many thought we would have a monarchy with George Washington as King.

No one had thought of how 13 states would all share power.

Bear in mind, we started from scratch. No supreme ruler, no parliament, no judicial system. We had to create it all.

Now again, our forefathers were brilliant in creating the system we have, but the real brilliance came when they did their research and used the writing and teachings of great minds of the past to develop their new government.

In other words, they called upon their history! This is one reason why we should all be outraged at the current movement to destroy our history, both good and bad.

Our forefathers grandparents survived the English Civil War and they themselves survived the rule of a tyrant king.

So when they sat down to create a new government they knew exactly what mistakes were made in the past, and took steps to assure they would not create a system that would allow those things to happen again.

Now as our forefathers looked at Hobbe’s teachings they found something else they thought should be included.

According to Hobbes, in a world without government, all people were inherently equal. In fact, their equality was partly what made life so terrible, because no single person was ever able to rise above anyone else.

Hobbes thought equality needed to be protected, and U.S. government has evolved to more firmly embrace the concept of equality.

After the Civil War, the adoption of the 14th Amendment, for example, forbade any jurisdiction from denying a person equality before the law. Before that, the Declaration of Independence, which stated that all men are created equal, provided only a conceptual foundation for equality in government.

Hobbes believed that the tendency towards self-preservation was a natural instinct and should be a cornerstone of governing principles.

In American government, the principle was first stated in the Declaration of Independence as the fact that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Hobbes thought preserving one’s own life was the primary goal. In the U.S. Constitution, the post-Civil War 14th Amendment explicitly forbids any state from depriving a person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.

Now, just like our forefathers, Thomas Hobbes also had a history that influenced his writings.

Thomas Hobbes was born in Westport, England, on April 5, 1588. His dad was the disgraced vicar of a local parish, and in the wake of the scandal (caused by brawling in front of his own church) he disappeared, abandoning his three children to the care of his brother.

This uncle of Hobbes’, a tradesman and alderman, provided for Hobbes’ education.

Already an excellent student of classical languages, at age 14 Hobbes went to Magdalen Hall in Oxford to study. He then left Oxford in 1608 and became the private tutor for William Cavendish, the eldest son of Lord Cavendish (later known as the first Earl of Devonshire).

In 1610, Hobbes traveled with William to France, Italy and Germany, where he met other leading scholars of the day.

Through his association with the Cavendish family, Hobbes entered circles where the activities of the king, members of Parliament, and other wealthy landowners were discussed, and his intellectual abilities brought him close to power (although he never became a powerful figure himself).

Through these channels, he began to observe the influence and structures of power and government. Also, the young William Cavendish was a member of Parliament (1614 and 1621), and Hobbes would have sat in on various parliamentary debates.

In the late 1630s, Hobbes became linked with the royalists in disputes between the king and Parliament, as the two factions were in conflict over the scope of kingly powers, especially regarding raising money for armies.

In 1640, Hobbes wrote a piece defending King Charles I’s wide interpretation of his own rights in these matters, and royalist members of Parliament used sections of Hobbes’ writings in debates.

The writings were circulated, and The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic became Hobbes’ first work of political philosophy (although he never intended it to be published as a book).

The conflict between the King and Parliament then led to the English Civil Wars (1642-1651), which led to the king being executed and a republic being declared.

Hobbes then left the country to preserve his personal safety, living in France from 1640 to 1651.

Now to drive home the point of everyone having a history, consider this.

Hobbes had never been trained in mathematics or the sciences at Oxford, nor previously at Wiltshire.

But one branch of the Cavendish family, the Wellbecks, were scientifically and mathematically minded, and Hobbes’ growing interest in these areas was stirred mainly through his association with certain family members and through various conversations he’d had and reading he’d done on the Continent.

In 1629 or 1630, it is reported that Hobbes found a volume of Euclid and fell in love with geometry and Euclid’s method of demonstrating theorems.

Later, he had gained enough independent knowledge to pursue research in optics, a field he would lay claim to as a pioneer. In fact, Hobbes was gaining a reputation in many fields: mathematics (especially geometry), translation (of the classics), and law.

He also became well known (notorious, in fact) for his writings and disputes on religious subjects. He was also respected as a theorist in ethics and politics.

His love of mathematics and a fascination with the properties of matter–sizes, shapes, positions, etc.–laid the foundation for 3 books he wrote known as the Elements of Philosophy trilogy: De Cive (1642; “Concerning the Citizen”), De Corpore (1655; “Concerning Body”) and De Homine (1658; “Concerning Man”).

The trilogy was his attempt to arrange the components of natural science, psychology and politics into a hierarchy, from the most fundamental to the most specific.

In 1642,  Hobbes released De Cive, his first published book of political philosophy. Although it was to be the third book in Elements, Hobbes wrote it first to address the civil unrest  in England at the time.

While still in Paris, Hobbes began work on what would become his greatest work and one of the most influential books ever written: Leviathan.

It is important to note that  Leviathan, was written during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651), and for that reason, Hobbes argues for the necessity of the social contract, in which individuals mutually unite into political societies, agreeing to abide by common rules and accept duties to protect themselves and one another from whatever might come their way.

He also calls for rule by an absolute sovereign, saying that chaos–and other situations identified with a “state of nature” (a pre-government state in which individuals’ actions are bound only by those individuals’ desires and restraints)–could be averted only by a strong central government, one with the power of the biblical Leviathan (a sea creature), which would protect people from their own selfishness.

He also warned of “the war of all against all”, a motto that went on to greater fame and represented Hobbes’ view of humanity without government.

As Hobbes lays out his thoughts on the foundation of states and legitimate government, he does it methodically: The state is created by humans, so he first describes human nature.

He says that in each of us can be found a representation of general humanity and that all acts are ultimately self-serving–that in a state of nature, humans would behave completely selfishly.

He concludes that humanity’s natural condition is a state of perpetual war, fear and lack of morality, and that only government can hold a society together.

 

Hobbes’ ideas helped form the building blocks of nearly all Western political thought, including the right of the individual and the importance of republican government rather than mob rule.

The historical importance of his political philosophy cannot be overstated. The teachings of Thomas Hobbes had a tremendous influence on our forefathers and many of the basic principals embedded in our society today.

So there you have it folks. Was Thomas Hobbes right?

Are we naturally greedy, angry, and criminal humans that must submit to an all powerful government to keep us from going crazy?

Or were our forefathers correct in taking his teachings and developing a government based on laws but still enforcing certain inalienable rights?

There are those today who would gladly destroy the system we have, only to create the society Hobbes warned us about.

 

 

Watching the news this week I couldn’t help but think of a famous quote by Author George Orwell.

A good friend of mine, Bill Wright, who lives in Florida sent me that quote and suggested I do a show on George Orwell, so here goes.

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

Matthew Feeney,  the director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Emerging Technologies wrote a great article on Orwell.

In October 1947, Eric Blair—known today by his pen name George Orwell—wrote a letter to the co‐​owner of the Secker & Warburg publishing house. In that letter, Orwell noted that he was in the “last lap” of the rough draft of a novel, describing it as “a most dreadful mess.”

He completed it the following year, having transformed his “most dreadful mess” into “1984,” one of the 20th century’s most important novels.

Orwell was a master of the English language and his legacy lives on through some of the words he created. Even those who haven’t read “1984” know some of its “newspeak.”

“1984” provides English speakers with a vocabulary to discuss surveillance, police states and authoritarianism, which includes terms such as “Big Brother,” “thought police,” “unperson” and “doublethink,” to name a few.

The authoritarian government of Orwell’s Oceania doesn’t merely punish dissent severely—it seeks to make even thinking about dissent impossible.

When Inner Party member O’Brien tortures “1984’s” protagonist, Winston Smith, he holds up his hand with four fingers extended and asks Smith how many fingers he sees. When Smith replies, “Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!” O’Brien inflicts excruciating pain on him.

After Smith finally claims to see five fingers, O’Brien emphasizes that saying “five” is not enough. “ No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four.”

Orwell’s own name inspired an adjective, “Orwellian,” which is widely used in modern political rhetoric.

It’s usually our enemies who are acting Orwellian, and it’s a testament to Orwell’s talents that everyone seems to think “1984” is about their political opponents.

The political left sees plenty of Orwellian tendencies in the White House and the criminal justice system.

The political right bemoans “thought police” on college campuses and social media companies turning users into “unpersons.”

But politicians can lie without being Orwellian, and a private company closing a social media account is nothing like a state murdering someone and eliminating them from history.

Likewise, perceived academic conformity might be potentially stifling, but it’s hardly comparable to a conformity enforced by a police state that eliminates entire words from society.

Yet when U.S. government officials use terms such as “enhanced interrogation,” “alternative facts,” “collateral damage,” or “extremists,” they understand that what they’re describing is actually torture, lies, innocent civilian deaths, and political dissidents.

They prefer it if others, especially the press, used and believed in Orwellian language that dehumanizes enemies of the government and makes their horrific violence sound tolerable or even justified.

We see far more nefarious and barbaric distortions of language abroad. According to reports by activists and researchers, the Chinese state has put about 1 million people, including many Muslim ethnic groups in “re‐​education” camps.

Reports reveal that the camps are hardly schools. They’re brutal indoctrination sites, with inmates forced to recite Communist Party propaganda and renounce Islam.

North Korea, the country that comes closest to embodying “1984,” has hampered its citizens’ abilities to think for themselves with a disheartening measure of success.

It’s hardly surprising that when Park read Orwell’s classic novel “ Animal Farm,” she felt as if Orwell knew where she was from.

Orwell was not a prophet, but he identified a necessary feature of any successful authoritarian government. To control you effectively, it can’t merely threaten death, imprisonment or torture. It’s not enough for it to ban books and religions.

As long as the state doesn’t dominate your consciousness, it’s under constant risk of overthrow.

We shouldn’t fear the U.S. turning into Orwell’s dystopian nightmare just yet.

But at a time when political dishonesty is rampant, we should remember “1984’s” most important lesson: The state can occupy your mind.

 

Another good article on this topic was written by:

Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster and Director of the Orwell Foundation.

1984, with its disorientating first sentence, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”, defines the peculiar characteristics of modern tyranny.

Winston Smith, the protagonist, works as a censor in the Ministry of Truth in a constant updating of history to suit present circumstances and shifting alliances.

He and his fellow workers are controlled as a mass collective by the all-seeing and all-knowing presence of Big Brother. In 1984 television screens watch you, and everyone spies on everyone else.

Today it is social media that collects every gesture, purchase, comment we make online, and feeds an all knowing presence in our lives that can predict our every preference.

Modeled on consumer choices, where the user is the commodity that is being marketed, the harvesting of those preferences for political campaigns is now distorting democracy.

Orwell understood that oppressive regimes always need enemies. In 1984 he showed how these can be created arbitrarily by whipping up popular feeling through propaganda.

But in his description of the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ he also foresaw the way in which online mobs work.

Obliged to watch the violent film, (as everyone is), Winston Smith observes “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in…A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current”.

Now political, religious and commercial organizations all trade in whipping up feelings. Orwell uncannily identified the willing collusion in hate that such movements can elicit: and of course Winston observes it in himself. So, by implication might we, in ourselves.

Then there is Orwell’s iconic dictator Big Brother: absurd and horrifying in equal measure.

Orwell’s writing is rooted in the struggles between the giant ‘-isms’ that disfigured the 20th Century. He fought against Fascism as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War (believing pacifism was a luxury paid for by other people) but realized the hollow promise of Communism, when the anti-Stalinist group he was fighting for was hunted down by the pro-Stalin faction.

He witnessed first-hand the self-deception of true believers. Today there is another set of ‘-isms’, such as nationalism and populism who operate through the mobilization of that most dangerous of feelings, resentment.

And everywhere you look in the contemporary world, ‘strong’ men are in positions of power. They share the need to crush opposition, a fanatical terror of dissent and self-promotion. Big Brothers are no longer a joke but strut the world.

But the greatest horror in Orwell’s dystopia is the systematic stripping of meaning out of language. The regime aims to eradicate words and the ideas and feelings they embody. Its real enemy is reality.

Tyrannies attempt to make understanding the real world impossible: seeking to replace it with phantoms and lies. Winston Smith’s first audacious act of dissent had been to hide from the all-seeing camera and write a diary – to compose his own account of himself and his inner world.

He knows that the acts of writing and describing mark him out for the death penalty if he is discovered. When he is finally broken by torture he agrees that “two plus two equals five.” He had discovered that they could indeed “get inside you”, and “Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out”.

The terror in 1984 is the annihilation of the self and the destruction of the capacity to recognize the real world.

 

So exactly who was George Orwell?

Orwell was a British journalist and author, who wrote two of the most famous novels of the 20th century ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’.

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25th, 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant.

He was educated in England and, after he left Eton, joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. He resigned in 1927 and decided to become a writer.

In 1928, he moved to Paris where lack of success as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs. He described his experiences in his first book, ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, published in 1933.

He took the name George Orwell, shortly before its publication. This was followed by his first novel, ‘Burmese Days’, in 1934.

An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s he had begun to consider himself a socialist.

Late in 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist.

Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. By now he was a prolific journalist, writing articles, reviews and books.

In 1945, Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ was published. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell’s name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life.

‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ was published four years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with its title and many phrases – such as ‘Big Brother is watching you’.

By now Orwell’s health was deteriorating and he died of tuberculosis on 21 January 21st, 1950.

In 1946 Observer editor David Astor had lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century.

Orwell knew he was dying and raced to finish his book.

Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature.

“Orwellian” is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting story that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell’s book. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war.

The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, “The Last Man in Europe”, had been incubating in Orwell’s mind since the Spanish civil war.

His novel, started to come together  during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard.

Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was “convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world” at Tehran.

Orwell had worked for David Astor’s Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent.

The editor professed great admiration for Orwell’s “absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency”, and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell’s creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm.

As the war drew to a close, the interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated “fairy tale”.

There were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell’s flat was wrecked by a German buzz bomb.

The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became key to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow.

In March 1945, while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anesthesia during a routine operation.

Suddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his London flat, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife’s premature death.

Now Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura.

In May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was “almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage”.

It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century.

Ironically, part of Orwell’s difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm. After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. “Everyone keeps coming at me,” he complained to Koestler, “wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc – you don’t know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again.”

On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island came with its own price.

Years before, in the essay “Why I Write”, he had described the struggle to complete a book: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand.

Trust me, having written a book of my own, I know where he is coming from.

From the spring of 1947 to his death in 1950, his health declining steadily, and now diagnosed with TB, Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on June 8th, 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognized as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice.

After the book was published, Orwell’s health continued to decline.

He lingered on into the new year of 1950 and in the early hours of January 21st,  he suffered a massive hemorrhage in the hospital and died alone.

If you haven’t done so, I encourage my listeners to read 1984.

Are we currently creating the nightmarish world that Orwell created in his book? I leave you with this passage from 1984:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

 

 

The first professional police force in the United Kingdom, funded by local taxation, was set up in Glasgow, Scotland in 1800.
At the time, the City of Glasgow police undertook more duties than modern police, including fire fighting.
The first professional policemen, in England, known as ‘Peelers’ or ‘Bobbies’, were set up in London in 1829 by Robert Peel, the then Home Secretary, after ‘The Metropolitan Police Act’ of 1829.
Before Peel’s 1829 reforms, public order had been maintained by a mix of night watchmen, local constables and red-coat-wearing army soldiers, who were deployed as much to quell political troubles as to deal with local crime.
In creating London’s Metropolitan Police (headquartered on a short street called Scotland Yard), Peel sought to create a professionalized law enforcement corps that was as accountable to everyday citizens as to the ruling classes.
When Peel’s opponents complained that the creation of the new police force would restrict personal liberties, Peel responded, “I want to teach people that liberty does not consist in having your house robbed by organized gangs of thieves, and in leaving the principal streets of London in the nightly possession of drunken women and vagabonds.”
Working conditions for the people of England during the 19th century were terrible. Children were expected to be in the cotton mills by 3 AM and work until 10 PM with no more than an hour in all for mealtime breaks.

In normal times they worked from 6 AM to 8:30 PM, 6 days a week for a total weekly wage of 3 schillings.Other women and children were reported as having to crawl half naked through narrow shafts of ill ventilated mines.

An apprentice brick-layer might have 14 hours days and expect punishment with a strap if they were slow.

Thousands of workers in Liverpool and Manchester worked in unventilated cellars. Often these towns lacked paved streets, sewers, or garbage collectors.

The average diet was limited to bread, tea, sugar, and beer supplemented with potatoes, cheese, turnips, beans, and cabbage.

Needless to say, crime ran rampant through the streets and protests were common.
But Instead of the resented government red coats, Robert Peel’s patrolmen wore black jackets and tall wool hats with shiny badges.
They went out armed only with a short club and a whistle for summoning backup, walking regular beats and working to gain the trust of the local citizens.
Robert Peel’s system was a success, and by the mid-19th century large American cities had created similar police forces.
In London, the policemen were so identified with Peel who created them that they were referred to as “Peelers” or—more memorably—“Bobbies,” after the popular nickname for Robert.
It was the start of a campaign to improve public law. At that time, there was distrust of the police at all levels.
By September of 1829, the first Metropolitan Police were patrolling the streets of London. There were 17 divisions, which had 4 inspectors and 144 constables each.
The force headquarters was Scotland Yard, and it answered to the Home Secretary.
As I said earlier, ‘Peelers’ wore a long blue coats and strengthened tall hats, which protected them from blows to the head and they could use them to stand on to look over walls.
Their only weapon was a truncheon, a short heavy club, although they also carried a whistle to raise an alarm.
At first, the quality of officers was poor. Of the first 2,800 new policemen, only 600 eventually kept their jobs.
The first Metropolitan policeman (who was given the number 1), was fired after only four hours, for drunkenness. Things eventually settled down.
Despite rising crime levels, most counties retained their Parish Constable.
Many people were concerned about the idea of a uniformed force and feared that the police would be used to arrest opponents of the government, stop protests and destroy free speech.
The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, allowed Borough Councils to organize a police force but few of them seemed eager to implement the law. By 1837, only 93 out of 171 boroughs had organized a police force.
The Rural Constabulary Act of 1839, allowed any of the 54 English Counties to raise and equip a paid police force.
The Act permitted judges to appoint Chief Constables, for the direction of the police in their areas and allowed for one policeman per 1,000 population.
In the 1840s, there was still a great disparity between different areas of the country with no single style of policing.
By that time, only 108 out of 171 boroughs had police forces. Then, in 1842, a new Parish Constables Act was passed in response to the political unrest.
The appointed parish constables were part time and poorly paid – sometimes unpaid, so posts attracted a low caliber of persons, who were not prepared to risk life and limb to arrest anyone.
By 1848 there were still 22 boroughs that did not have a police force and, in 1850, only 36 counties that did.
In 1855, there were still only 12,000 policemen in all of England and Wales. This was despite the fact that the police force in London was proving effective in reducing crime and increasing detection.
The 1856 Police Act saw a system for government inspection, audit and regulation for the first time. This County Borough Police Act now forced the whole of the country to set up police forces. The legislation:
• Obliged the counties to organize police forces, subject to government control
• Devised a system of inspection already in use in factories, workhouses and education
• Made grants dependent on efficiency.
• Shifted the emphasis from the prevention of crime to its detection.
This act saw the start of the Modern Police Service in England and Wales. 239 forces were set up, still with great variations in pay and conditions; only half of them were found to be efficient.
Similarly, the General Police Act (Scotland) 1857 required each Scottish county and burgh to set up a police force.
In 1869, the National Criminal Record was set up, which made use of the new, rapid telegraph communications between forces and in 1877 the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) was formed with 200 detectives; 600 more were added in 1883.
By the start of the 19th century, there was increasing support for the concept of a professional, state-funded, full-time police force.
Robert Peel, supported the idea of the Government taking responsibility for organizing policing. However, the idea was still very controversial.
Peel had argued that because the crime rate was rising, especially in the industrial towns and in London, a change in policing was needed.
People were increasingly aware that most of the existing methods of catching criminals were not effective, particularly in the light of the massive industrial, agricultural and population changes at the time.
The growth of popular protest convinced many that a professional police force was required.
However, many people were opposed to the idea of a state-run police force as they believed it would threaten freedom.
People thought the Government would use the police force to force people to do what they wanted. This had been seen in other European countries.
People thought the police would be busy-bodies and would pry into people’s business. However, the main opposition was the increased tax that would be required to pay for the police force.
Back in 1829 the Metropolitan Police Act had set up the Metropolitan Police Force in central London. Two commissioners were appointed to set up and run the new police force.
3,200 men were recruited to be full-time, trained and paid policemen. Many of the new Constables were ex-soldiers. Numbers quickly grew and by 1882 there were 11,700 men in the London Metropolitan Police.
It was the success of the Metropolitan Police that led to the idea of a police force being extended within London and across the whole of England and Wales.
Each new area set up their own force on the same lines as the London Metropolitan Police.
At first all of the new police forces consisted of ordinary constables and inspectors. Constables were expected to be young men, over 5’7” tall and be able to read and write.
Early Victorian police worked seven days a week, with only five days unpaid holiday a year for which they received the grand sum of £1 per week.
Their lives were strictly controlled; they were not allowed to vote in elections and required permission to get married and even to share a meal with a civilian.
To allay the public’s suspicion of being spied upon, officers were required to wear their uniforms both on and off duty.
As I said. they worked seven days a week and spent their time ‘walking the beat’ – a set patrol area on foot.
At first there was a lot of opposition to the new police forces, especially in poorer, working class areas, such as the East End of London.
Across the country there was resentment over the increased taxation required to fund the police.
In some slum areas the police still had difficulties winning over the local population. It was only in the 1850s that certain areas were able to be regularly patrolled by officers.
Now Peel came up with a set of 9 Principles by which to describe the duties and expectations demanded of a policeman on his force.
Perhaps these would be a good starting point for negotiations in dealing with the current conflict between law enforcement and the protestors in our urban areas.
Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles:
1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.
3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.
4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.
5. Police seek and preserve public favor not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.
6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.
7. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.
9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.
Pretty good ideas if you ask me.
In spite of the huge success of his ‘Bobbies’, Peel was not a well liked man.
Queen Victoria is said to have found him ‘a cold, unfeeling, disagreeable man’. They had many personal conflicts over the years, and when he spoke against awarding her son, Prince Albert, an annual income of £50,000, he did little to endear himself to the Queen.
Although Peel was a skilful politician, he had very few social graces and had a reserved, off-putting manner.
After a long and distinguished career, Sir Robert came to an unfortunate end …he was thrown from his horse while riding on Constitution Hill in London on June 29th,1850, and died three days later.
His legacy remains however as long as the British ‘Bobbies’ patrol the streets and keep the population safe from wrong-doers …and help lost tourists find their way back to the comfort of their hotels.
So there you have it folks. History repeats itself. As we try to find solutions for our current conflicts, should we look to the past for answers or simply ignore the success of Sir Robert Peel?

source: The Conversation by Jack L. Rozdilsky
Associate Professor of Disaster and Emergency Management, York University, Canada
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, American cities are coping with strife and civil unrest comparable to 1968.
On June, 1st President Trump specifically named the Insurrection Act of 1807 as a possible remedy to the current crisis. Surprisingly, due to that obscure act, Trump may indeed have the power to send federal troops into states without a request from the governor, even as the Pentagon tries to distance itself from the threat.
In times of disaster, active-duty military troops can indeed be ordered to perform actions to protect life, property and maintain order.
In terms of U.S. federal legislation enabling the government to take action to respond to disaster, the Stafford Act authorizes the use of the military for disaster relief. In such cases, a state’s governor must make a request for the military to provide very specific support roles for disaster relief efforts.
However, in the American constitutional republic, there are direct limits on the support roles that the military can play in times of crisis.
Restrictions on the participation of the military in domestic law enforcement are interpreted through the Posse Comitatus Act. It’s been in force since 1878, when it was enacted as part of a backlash against the imposition of federal martial law in the former Confederate States during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.
There are four statutory exceptions when the military can act in a domestic law enforcement capacity, in direct contradiction to the Posse Comitatus Act.
Three of the exceptions are based on enabling responses to contemporary threats to the United States, when only the federal government would be capable of mustering the resources necessary to respond to serious national security crises of grave concern.
Those situations pertain to fighting drug and transnational organized crime activities, assistance in the case of crimes involving nuclear material and emergency situations involving the use of weapons of mass destruction.
The fourth exception is the Insurrection Act, which has had very little alteration since it was enacted on March 3, 1807.
The act permits the federal deployment of military force into the states to suppress insurrections and enforce federal law in three circumstances. These circumstances are clearly defined by the legislation.
Federal aid to state governments is the first circumstance that allows for federal military intervention to suppress an insurrection in a state, upon the request of that state’s governor or legislature.
During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, for example, President George H.W. Bush deployed federal troops at the request of the California governor to quell civil uprisings in south-central L.A.
Another section of the act, entitled “Use of Militia and Armed Forces to Enforce Federal Authority” permits the president, on his own initiative, to suppress rebellion or enforce federal laws. If the president believes that …
“Unlawful obstructions, combinations, assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any States by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings …”
… then armed forces of the federal government can be deployed to the states.
The origins for the domestic use of troops are found in the Calling Forth Act of 1792, which allowed for President George Washington to send federal to troops to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion despite disagreements with the governor of Pennsylvania.
During the American Revolution, individual states incurred significant debt. In 1790 Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton pushed for the federal government to take over that debt. He also suggested an excise tax on whiskey to prevent further financial difficulty.
President George Washington was opposed to Hamilton’s suggestion of a whiskey tax. In 1791 Washington journeyed through Virginia and Pennsylvania to speak with citizens about their views.
Local government officials however, met the idea of a whiskey tax with enthusiasm, and Washington took this assurance back to Congress, which passed the bill.
But protests against the new tax began immediately, arguing that the tax was unfair to small producers. Under the new law, large producers paid the tax annually at a rate of six cents per gallon, and the more they produced, the further the tax breaks. Small producers, however, were stuck with paying nine cents per gallon in taxes. Farmers took further issue because only cash would be accepted for tax payment.
The law was immediately a failure, since refusals to pay the taxes were as common as intimidation against officials hired to collect them.
Perhaps inevitably, violence broke out. On September 11, 1791, excise officer Robert Johnson was riding through his collection route in western Pennsylvania when he was surrounded by 11 men dressed as women. The mob stripped him naked and then tarred and feathered him before stealing his horse and abandoning him in the forest.
Johnson recognized two men in the mob. He made a complaint and warrants were issued for their arrest. A cattle drover named John Connor was sent with the warrants, and he suffered the same fate as Johnson. He was tied to a tree in the woods for five hours before being found. In response, Johnson resigned his post, fearing further violence.

In the summer of 1794, federal marshal David Lenox began the process of serving writs to 60 distillers in western Pennsylvania who had not paid the tax. On July 14, Lenox accepted the services of tax collector and wealthy landowner John Neville as guide through Allegheny County.
On July 17, 1794, as many as 700 men marched to drums and gathered at Neville’s home. They demanded his surrender, but Major James Kirkpatrick, one of 10 soldiers who had come to the property to help defend it, answered that Neville was not there. In fact, Kirkpatrick had helped Neville escape the house and hide in a ravine.
The mob demanded that the soldiers surrender. When that request was refused, they set fire to a barn and slave dwellings. The Neville women were allowed to flee to safety, after which the mob opened fire on the house. Following an hour of gunfighting, the mob’s leader, James McFarlane, was killed. In a rage, the mob set fire to other buildings and the soldiers soon surrendered as the Bower Hill estate burned to the ground.
Less than a week later, the mob met with local dignitaries who warned that Washington would send a militia to strike them down and they had to strike first. Wealthy landowner David Bradford, along with several other men, attacked a mail carrier and discovered three letters from Pittsburgh expressing disapproval of the attack on Neville’s property.
Bradford used these letters as an excuse to encourage an attack on Pittsburgh, inciting 7,000 men to show up at Braddock’s Field, east of the city.
The city of Pittsburgh, fearing violence, sent a delegation to announce that the three letter writers had been expelled from the city and to offer a gift of several barrels of whiskey.
As the day ended, the crowd had drunk deeply from the barrels and weren’t inspired to descend on Pittsburgh with any fury, instead gaining permission to march through Pittsburgh peacefully.

With signs that the rebels were hoping to reignite the conflict and believing it was linked to unrest in other parts of the country, Hamilton wanted to send troops to Pennsylvania, but Washington opted for a peace envoy instead.
The peace envoy failed. Washington met with his cabinet officials and presented evidence of the violence to Supreme Court Justice James Wilson, who ruled a military response was justified under the auspices of the Militia Acts of 1792. Washington assumed emergency power to assemble more than 12,000 men from the surrounding states and eastern Pennsylvania as a federal militia.
Washington met first with the rebels, who assured him the militia was not needed and that order had been restored. Washington opted to retain the military option until proof of submission was apparent.
The large and well-armed militia marched into western Pennsylvania and was met with angry citizens but little violence. When a rebel army didn’t appear, the militia rounded up suspected rebels instead.
However, the rebellion’s instigators had already fled, and the militia’s prisoners weren’t involved in the rebellion. They were marched to Philadelphia to stand trial regardless. Only two men were found guilty of treason, and both were pardoned by Washington.
The federal response to the Whiskey Rebellion was widely believed to be a critical test of federal authority, one that Washington’s fledgling government met with success.
The Calling Forth Act that was used in The Whiskey Rebellion, was extended into the 1807 Insurrection Act as the militia acts of the 1790s that first delegated sweeping emergency powers to the president expired.
A section of the Insurrection Act entitled “Interference with States and Federal Law” allows for the president to take any measures necessary to suppress, in a state, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.
Need another example? Here you go.
By 1932, the third year of the Great Depression, the stage was set for a dramatic confrontation.
In 1924, when the economy had been strong, Congress had passed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, awarding bonuses to surviving veterans of World War I. There was a catch, however: The “bonus” certificates, which would have been worth approximately $500 plus compounded interest, were not redeemable until 1945.
One former sergeant and combat veteran from World War I, Walter Waters of Portland, Oregon, decided that wasn’t good enough. Like many, if not most of the surviving veterans, by 1932 Waters was unemployed. He wanted his money now.
At a Portland veterans meeting in March, Waters raised the idea of descending on Washington en masse to pressure Congress to paying the bonus immediately.
Thus the so-called Bonus Expeditionary Force—also known as the Bonus Army—was formed. In the late spring of 1932, the ragtag “army” of 17,000 veterans and their families, led by Waters, descended on Washington by foot, truck and train to demand their pay.
Most of the Army settled in Anacostia Flats, a muddy area across the Anacostia River south of the 11th Street Bridge. There they erected a sprawling network of camps—which they of course called Hoovervilles—to serve as their base to lobby Congress and make their presence known around the capital.
The sprawling cluster of camps, which included sanitation facilities and even a library, were tightly supervised by “Commander Waters,” as he was now called, and his adjutants.
Veterans were required to register and prove that they had been honorably discharged. There were a lot of American flags at Bonus City, the main Anacostia camp. Basically, the vets just wanted their money.
The Army was partly successful. On June 15, after an impassioned debate which caused one representative to drop dead of a heart attack on the floor of Congress, the House passed the $2.4 billion Wright Patman bill by which the Bonus Marchers and the other surviving doughboys would immediately be given $1,000.
The celebration was premature. Two days later the Senate rejected the bill by a wide margin.
President Hoover now convinced himself, with the aid of Douglas MacArthur, his Caesar-like Army chief of staff that the Bonus Army had been infiltrated by communists and was planning to stage a revolt.
This was not true. In fact, Waters had made a point of ferreting out any Reds or would-be Reds from his “troops.” It didn’t matter. As far as Hoover and MacArthur were concerned, the Bonus Marchers were a horde of criminals and communist subversives.
Finally, on the afternoon of Thursday, July 28, 1932, under prodding from the White House, the commissioners of the District of Columbia ordered the D.C. police to clear the area where the Bonus Marchers were squatting.
The police moved in. The veterans, who were armed with nothing more than bricks, resisted. Bricks were thrown. Shots rangs out. When the smoke cleared one veteran was dead, another was mortally wounded and a D.C. policeman also lay near death.
That is when the D.C. commissioners asked the White House for federal troops.
Hoover, now fed up with the rabble outside his house, was happy to oblige the District commissioners’ request for reinforcements. The president passed the request to his secretary of War, Patrick Hurley, who passed the request to four-star General MacArthur, who also was happy to oblige.
In Hoover’s statement justifying sending in federal troops, which was carried on the front page of the New York Times and other major American newspapers, he asserted: “An examination of a large number of names discloses the fact that a considerable part of those remaining are not veterans; many are Communists and persons with criminal records.”
“Damned lie,” Waters raged. “Every man is a veteran. We examined the papers of everyone.” It didn’t matter: The then-largely conservative American press backed Hoover.
To say that MacArthur was eager to do battle with the Bonus Army is to understate the case. For weeks his men at nearby Fort Myers had undergone anti-riot training for just such a confrontation.
Still, there was neither need nor call for MacArthur himself to actually be on the scene that afternoon, as his aide, Major Dwight Eisenhower, reportedly told him. “I told that son of a bitch that he shouldn’t go there,” Eisenhower later recounted. MacArthur’s subordinate, General Perry Miles, was technically in charge.
But there MacArthur wasas the bayonet-wielding men of the 12th Infantry Regiment, and the mounted troops of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported by six M197 light tanks, marched up Pennsylvania Avenue while thousands of civil service employees left work to line the street and watch.
The New York Times reported what happened next: “Amidst scenes reminiscent of the mopping up of a town in the World War, Federal troops drove the army of bonus marchers from the shanty town near Pennsylvania Avenue in which the veterans had been entrenched for months.
Ordered to the scene by President Hoover detachments of infantry, cavalry, machine gun and tank crews laid down an effective tear-gas barrage which disorganized the bonus-seekers, and then set fire to the shacks and tents left behind.”
As newsreel cameras rolled, MacArtur’s men proceeded to forcibly evict the remaining veterans and their families and torch their tents. Fifty-five veterans were injured and 135 arrested in the confrontation that day.
Let me give you one final example.The 1957 deployment of federal troops by President Dwight Eisenhower to enforce school desegregation orders in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine black students who enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957.
Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
On September 4, 1957, the first day of classes at Central High, Governor Orval Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard to block the black students’ entry into the high school.
Later that month, President Eisenhower sent in 1,200 members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and placed them in charge of the 10,000 National Guardsmen on duty. Escorted by the troops, the Little Rock Nine attended their first full day of classes on September 25.
While Trump has stopped short of invoking the 1807 act to use the military to enforce laws domestically, he’s kept the option open and as you can see, he would not be the first president to use federal forces.
Section 334 of the Insurrection Act states:
“Whenever the President considers it necessary to use the militia or the armed forces under this chapter, he shall, by proclamation, immediately order the insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their abodes within a limited time.”

Well, we all saw the news this past weekend of violent protests in the streets of major cities throughout the nation.
Once again, the national media in its coverage, left us all scratching our heads.
Who are these antifa folks they keep talking about? What in the world are they protesting? Is it the tragic death of George Floyd, or do they have some other agenda?
Let’s start with who they are.
Antifa: The antifa movement is composed of far left-wing, autonomous, militant anti-fascist groups and individuals in the United States. The principal feature of antifa groups is their use of direct action, with conflicts occurring both online and in real life.
They engage in various protest tactics, which include on-line activism, property damage, physical violence, and harassment against those whom they identify as fascist, racist, or on the far-right.
Now we all know what is meant by being far right. But what again is this term Fascist?
Fascism: Fascism is a form of radical right-wing, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy.
The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, before spreading to other European countries. Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, and Francisco Franco were all Fascist Dictators Opposed to liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism, fascism is on the far-right when speaking of left–right political positions. So, Antifa is far left wing and anti far right wing.
Let’s add one more definition before we start.

Collectivism: Collectivism is a political theory associated with communism. More broadly, it is the idea that people should prioritize the good of society over the welfare of the individual. So, tax me to death so everyone benefits.
Now there was a great article about all this in the recent issue of “The American Thinker” by writer Paul Krause.
He made an interesting point when he stated “Antifa storms in and out of the news, despite that fact, the Left is unable to denounce this militant band of thugs. The Left cannot denounce Antifa because Antifa embodies the very concept of war and violence that collectivism needs to thrive on. To attack Antifa would be to attack the heart of the cancerous poison that is destroying liberty oriented societies”.
This concept was first presented by a fellow named Michael Oakeshott.
Michael Oakeshott is largely forgotten.
Even at the peak of his powers, as a professor of political science at the London School of Economics from 1951 to 1969, he was overshadowed by other political scientists of his time.
Yet Oakeshott has more to teach us about our current times than any of the others.
Oakeshott’s focus was on the conduct of politics itself, with governance.
Unconcerned with the minutiae of policy proposals or manifesto pledges, his work was to explain the workings of politics to serve a nation.
He was writing at a time when –isms dominated politics. Keynesianism (the promotion of monetary and fiscal programs by government to increase employment and spending) , socialism and central planning had captured the politics of the West, while varying degrees of collectivism and Communism prevailed behind the Iron Curtain.
In his most famous essay, “Rationalism in Politics”, published in 1962, he attacked the intellectual conceit that underpins all these –isms, namely the misplaced faith in “rationalism” that stemmed from the 18th-century enlightenment. “

To the Rationalist”, Oakeshott wrote, “nothing is of value merely because it exists (and certainly not because it has existed for many generations), familiarity has no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for want of scrutiny.” In other words, just because it has proven to work in the past, it should still be challenged.
By ignoring what he called “practical knowledge”—custom or tradition, as he meant it—the rationalist, armed merely with “technical knowledge”, created the illusion that bureaucrats and governments could solve all of our problems. Racism, poverty, gun violence, health care, you name it, government can fix it.
By contrast, Oakeshott identified what he called a “conservative disposition”, and this is what makes him especially relevant today.
What is the conservative disposition?
For a start, Oakehsott was against chasing unicorns, or just throwing out the political playbook. (Change for the sake of change).
For a politician of this disposition “will find small and slow changes more tolerable than large and sudden: and he will value highly every appearance of continuity.”
Hence his famous dictum that the conservative will “prefer the familiar to the unknown…the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible.”
Oakeshott, like the Anglo-Irish writer and politician Edmund Burke before him, was not against change, but he was very aware that “innovation entails certain loss” and only “ possible gain”.
The person of this disposition, he argues, “understands it to be the business of government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed on, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile…And all this not because passion is vice and moderation is virtue, but because moderation is indispensable if passionate men are to escape being locked in an encounter of mutual frustration.” (Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater).
Sadly, there could be no better description of our current government crisis, and the divisions that it has created – an “encounter of mutual frustration.”
Governing is described by Oakeshott as a “specific and limited activity”, but one of those very specific activities is to mediate differences, not to widen them.
These virtues of government, as Oakeshott would have termed them, can also be described as the virtues of pragmatism, or indeed statecraft.
When people say the federal government has lost its mind, this is exactly what they mean, the government can no longer mediate differences and is in a state of mutual frustration.
It is time they went back and reviewed the teachings of Michael Oakeshott. And if Conservatives do not, others certainly will.
It bears repeating that the conservative disposition is not confined to a Conservative Party, or to any centre- right party. It can be used by others, and has been in the past.
Clement Attlee, Britain’s post-war Labour Prime Minister is a perfect example. He is still scorned by the radical left for not “reforming” any of Britain’s ancient institutions.
But this is exactly why he remains the left’s most successful “statesman”, because he understood the temper, of the electorate.
Oakeshott’s essay “The Political Economy of Freedom” is as relevant today as when it was published in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War, the rise of the bureaucratic welfare state, and the dawn of the Cold War.
Oakeshott provides cold insights into the reality of our now venerated New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt, and the welfare architects who shackled free society.
The aim of collectivists in free societies is not to wage a bloody revolution like the Jacobins (France) or the Bolsheviks (Russia).
As Oakeshott said, “modern advocates of collectivism disintegrate the integral and wholesome reality of liberty. We are instructed by the enemies of freedom masquerading as advocates of freedom, to distinguish between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ freedom, between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ freedom, between ‘social,’ ‘political,’ ‘civil,’ ‘economic,’ and ‘personal’ freedom.”
By focusing on only one or two freedoms, we are distracted as we lose our other freedoms.
How many times have we talked about America’s current lack of attention span? How the media now leads us by the nose from one story to the next?
Isn’t it amazing how the Covid virus has now slipped from headline news?
According to Oakeshott, liberals pose as champions of one type of distinguished freedom, while eroding and destroying all the other types of freedom. Rather than see freedom as interconnected and wholesome, the new collectivists see institutions, like our police departments, as oppressive and our present society as backward and tyrannical.
Think gun violence and gun control debate.
The new, far left liberal, therefore presents himself/herself as a champion of engineered liberty; which is to say that he/she controls what freedoms the population will be allowed to have.
Collectivism thrives on revolution and rioting. In fact, it needs revolution. Liberalism demands the mobilization of people to advance its aims.
As such, it is necessary for liberals to always have an existential threat which allows for the perpetuation of mobilized society. As Oakeshott says, “The real spring of collectivism is not a love of liberty, but war. The anticipation of war is the great incentive, and the conduct of war is the great collectivizing process.”
Abraham Lincoln began to collectivize the Union during the Civil War. Roosevelt further collectivized the “new nation” through the “war” on the Great Depression which was superseded by the Second World War.

Roosevelt subjugated civil society to the bureaucratic state and thrust the American economy into its perpetual war economy existence — if there is no war for the post-Roosevelt economy, the economy will decentralize back into the hands of those it was taken from under the guise of national emergency.
Antifa claims to be for peace. Its purpose is war. Beyond the insurmountable evidence that this is the case, the mere fact that Antifa exists to counter the existential threat of government control should also give away its true, bloodthirsty, and violent purpose of being.
There is nothing libertarian about Antifa. It is a socially engineered monster meant to act as the shock troops of the final collectivist campaign for the domination of what used to be free American society.
Antifa exists, as it does in all of these rioting cities, above the law. Without the law to keep the peace, we are in a state of war which allows for collectivism to present itself as the new agent of order.
Because collectivists have infiltrated our governments at the local, state, and federal levels, ever since FDR, and because the collectivist ideology needs war to sustain itself, the left leaning politicians will never be able to condemn Antifa.
Why? Because that would entail condemning their own philosophy of revolution to “fundamentally transform” the United States. This is not a recent phenomenon, it is a deeply rooted one, though Antifa is the most recent manifestation of this phenomenon of collectivism.
We are told that there is a war against minorities led by local police. We are told that there is a war on gays, lesbians, and the rest of the imaginary rainbow. We are told that there is a war on poor people. We are told that there is a war on decency and civility. We are told that there is a war on women.
There is a war on everything, according to the Left. And they use this prop of war to front themselves as champions of the “new freedom” which is, in reality, a front for further collectivist control.
Liberals in America do not openly seek the revolutions that tear down in an uncontrollable rage like the Jacobins or Bolsheviks of old but corrode and rearrange from the inside. They wage a revolution behind the scenes, only for us to wake up and ask what happened.
Antifa may come and go. But what it represents and embodies is nothing short of the bloodthirsty and domineering mindset that possessed the Jacobins to kill hundreds of thousands to try to reorganize French society in 1789 and the Bolsheviks to slay millions of their own people in their bloodthirsty effort to reorganize Russian society.
As Oakeshott says, in free societies collectivists cannot openly embrace such revolutionary tactics as they do in societies without the same longstanding traditions of liberty. Instead, they slip into the system and reorganize from the inside — slowly taking away our freedoms under the illusion of new freedoms and new progress.
Antifa’s manifesto calls for the reorganization of American society and the creation of a new man.
That’s precisely what collectivists past and present have always dreamed of achieving. And collectivists need war, or, in more palatable contemporary terms, an “emergency,” to usurp power for themselves for their domineering and hateful ends.
Collectivists need an imaginary enemy, to continue fighting their war for totalizing control over all people and society.
So there you have it folks. Was Michael Oakeshott correct? Have we lost our ability to govern?
If so, is it by accident or design?
Is Antifa simply a tool being wielded by the far left to gain political control?

 

Well folks, here we are. Fighting with our own government about all the Covid 19 restrictions.
We don’t know who to believe, and state governors are enforcing restrictions that fly in the face of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I think people are now fed up with government in general. I honestly believe that the majority of our citizens now see both Republican and Democrat politicians as incompetent and feel that the Federal government has completely lost its way.
In looking at all this, I can’t help but think of a historical figure who spoke up in defiance of the all powerful government of the United States.
So today, I would like to share his story.
Henry David Thoreau felt the same way many of us do today, all the way back in 1846.
Here is the story.
Henry David Thoreau, the son of a Concord pencil-maker, graduated from Harvard in 1837.
He worked a short while as a schoolmaster, but then began writing poetry.
He soon joined a religious, philosophical, and literary movement called Transcendentalism.
The leader of the movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a writer and lecturer. Basically a bunch of hippies saying that everyone should do their own thing.
At first, Thoreau agreed with Emerson’s teaching that social reform begins with the individual.
In 1845, he built a hut at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson.
For the next few years, Thoreau lived simply off the land, meditated, and wrote about nature. Again, basically a hippy 100 years ahead of his time!

Thoreau, in addition to communing with nature, also adopted another policy of the Transcendentalists.
“Every person should follow the dictates of his own individual conscience, even if doing so, he broke the laws of the land”.
Thoreau deliberately broke the law in 1846 by refusing to pay a poll tax.
His reason for not paying was that the tax would go to pay for the Mexican/American War, which he opposed.
I late July of 1846, Thoreau went to town to pick up some supplies.
On the way he met his friend, Sam Staples, who was tax collector, sheriff, and jailer. Are you out there listening Chris Twitchel?
Sam politely reminded Henry that he had not paid his poll tax. Henry said he would not pay it. So Sam said he’d pay it if Henry was hurting for money. Something Twitch would do.
Henry said it was the principal of the thing and he would not pay. Something I would do!
Sam told him, “If you don’t pay, I will have to lock you up.”
Henry replied, “Now is as good a time as any!” So Sam took his friend to jail.
Now Henry found jail fascinating. After all, he was a writer. There he came in contact with thieves, pirates, thugs and murderers. This gave him tons of new ideas for characters in his writings.
Well word go out that Henry had been arrested and his friends posted his bail.
When Sheriff Sam found the bail had been posted he went to the jail and told Henry he was free to go.
To Sam’s amazement Henry said he wouldn’t go! Henry said that since he hadn’t paid the bail, Sam couldn’t make him leave.
So Sam and the jailer physically drug Henry out of the jail and set him free.
Henry was furious and decided the best way to continue his protest was to write about it.
He then sat down and wrote a speech titled “Civil Disobedience” that he delivered at the Concord Lyceum in January 1848. ( note: Henry died of TB in 1862 at the age of 45)
Thoreau’s minor act of defiance caused him to conclude that it was not enough to be simply against slavery and the war. A person of conscience had to act. In “Civil Disobedience,” he proclaimed an activist manifesto:
“In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation, which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty, are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize”.
Thoreau argued that the government must end its unjust actions to earn the right to collect taxes from its citizens.
As long as the government commits unjust actions, he continued, conscientious individuals must choose whether to pay their taxes or to refuse to pay them and defy the government.
Thoreau declared that if the government required people to participate in injustice by obeying “unjust laws,” then people should “break the laws” even if they ended up in prison. Sound familiar to what we are seeing now folks?
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” he asserted, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
By not paying his taxes, Thoreau explained, he was refusing his allegiance to the government. “In fact,” he wrote, “I quietly declare war with the State….”
Unlike some later advocates of civil disobedience like Martin Luther King, Thoreau did not rule out using violence against an unjust government.
In 1859, Thoreau defended John Brown’s bloody attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, during his failed attempt to spark a slave revolt.
Thoreau had no objection to government taxes for highways and schools.
But government, he charged, was too often based on expediency, which can permit injustice in the name of public convenience.
The individual, he insisted, was never obliged to surrender conscience to the majority or to the State.
If a law “is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another,” he declares, “then, I say, break the law.” The essay makes it clear that this stance is not a matter of whim but a demanding moral principle.
Thoreau’s essay has had a huge influence on reformers worldwide, from Tolstoy in Russia and Gandhi in South Africa and India; to Martin Luther King, Jr’s civil rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States; to recent demonstrations for civil rights in the former Soviet Union and China.
Now this was not a call for violence. Gandhi himself advocated the use of civility at all times “the civil register,” which extols respect for the opposition and behavior out of understanding rather than anger.
He and his followers practiced “Non-violent, non-participation”. In other words, he invented the sit in! And like Thoreau, Gandhi was constantly seeking the higher truth with regard to man’s relationship in the universe.
Thoreau’s essay had more wide reaching political and social impact than most people know.
In the 1940’s it was read by the Danish resistance, in the 1950’s it was followed by people who opposed McCarthyism, in the 1960’s it was influential in the struggle against South African apartheid, and in the 1970’s it was discovered by a new generation of anti-war activists.
Thoreau was a firm believer in autonomy, professing individual defiance of unjust laws, and a stubborn resistance to government intrusion into society.
It is important to understand that Thoreau was not anti-government; he was pro “improved” government.
He stated, “But to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.”
Thoreau, at the time, saw a government that in his perception was often immoral, overbearing, and self-righteous.
Again, sound familiar?
Republicans hated Obamacare. Democrats hate building the wall. Impeachment, Obamagate, Socialism vs. Capitalism, now the Covid 19 fiasco.
Our nation has never been more divided. In Washington DC., yes. But how about out here among the people. The common folk, the individuals, who make up this great land of ours?
I meet regularly for coffee with friends who are to totally opposite to my views on politics. Nowadays we do it on Zoom.
We have lively discussions, argue over current events, and claim our opponents at the table are wrong.
Yet somehow, we agree to disagree, air our differences, smile and shake hands and set a time to meet the following week.
Why can’t that happen in our nation’s capital? My friends and I are as bull headed as they come, but we are willing to listen to both sides and still get along.
Would Thoreau roll over in his grave at the state of politics in America today? Or rather, would he urge us to stand up as individuals, take action against the established order with autonomy (neither Republican nor Democrat), reason, and intellect.
Let me share the first line of Thoreau’s lecture, “Civil Disobedience” (1849)
I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe- “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
Now interestingly enough, Thoreau went on to discuss the issue of the presidency.
I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.
O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through!
I think you can apply Thoreau’s words not just to the presidency, but to all of the federal politicians currently occupying the swamp that we call Washington, DC.
If you have not read “Civil Disobedience” I encourage you to do so. Put it in your left hand and put the declaration of Independence in your right.
Read them both. Then take a few minutes to think about what these two documents are saying. Think about the men who wrote them and the times they were living in.
We the people are losing all respect for the politicians on both sides of the aisle and the majority believe they are systematically destroying the principals upon which this great nation was founded.
Callers?

Source: US History.org
For many years, the Monroe Doctrine was practically a dead issue. The bold proclamation of 1823 that declared the Western Hemisphere forever free from European expansion humored the imperial powers who knew the United States was simply too weak to enforce its claim.
By 1900, the situation had changed. America was spreading its wings, daring the old world order to challenge its newfound might. When Theodore Roosevelt became President, he decided to reassert Monroe’s old declaration.
Following the Spanish American War, Cuba became the foundation for a new Latin American policy. Fearful that the new nation would be prey to the imperial powers of Europe, United States diplomats introduced the Platt Amendment of 1901.
Cuba was forbidden from entering any treaty that might endanger their independence. In addition, to prevent European gunboats from landing on Cuban shores, Cuba was prohibited from incurring a large debt. If any of these conditions were violated, Cuba agreed to permit American troops to land to restore order. Finally, the United States was granted a lease on a naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Independent in name only, Cuba became a legal protectorate of the United States.
As Marvin stated earlier, while the Monroe Doctrine blocked further expansion of Europe in the Western Hemisphere, the Roosevelt Corollary went one step further. Should any Latin American nation engage in “chronic wrongdoing,” a phrase that included large debts or civil unrest, the United States military would intervene. Europe was to remain across the Atlantic, while America would police the Western Hemisphere.
The first opportunity to enforce this new policy came in 1905, when the Dominican Republic was in jeopardy of invasion by European debt collectors. The United States invaded the island nation, seized its customs houses, and ruled the Dominican Republic as a protectorate until the situation was stabilized.
The effects of the new policy were enormous. Teddy Roosevelt had a motto: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” To Roosevelt, the big stick was the new American navy.
By remaining firm on our stance and possessing the naval might to back its interests, the United States could simultaneously defend its territory and avoid war.
Latin Americans did not like the corollary. They resented U.S. involvement as Yankee imperialism, and animosity against their large neighbor to the North grew dramatically.
By the end of the 20th century, the United States would send troops of invasion to Latin America over 35 times, establishing an undisputed sphere of influence throughout the hemisphere.
When the Columbian Senate unanimously rejected a proposed treaty giving the United States the right to build a canal through Panama (which was a province of Columbia at the time), Roosevelt referred to them as “the blackmailers of Bogotá“, and he said that trying to get the Columbian Senate to agree to anything was “like trying to nail jelly to the wall“.
In the end, Panamanians revolted, with US backing, declared their independence from Columbia, and concluded a treaty with the United States allowing the U.S. to build a canal.
In 1905, after a show of force by the U.S., the Dominican Republic caved in and allowed the United States to take over their collection of customs duty to retire debts owed to European nations.
While Latin American countries initially viewed protection from European creditors as positive, they quickly came to complain of “Yankee imperialism“.
In 1907 Roosevelt waved the big stick again when he sent the “Great White Fleet” (largely made up of new naval construction) on a world tour clearly designed to impress Latin American and Asian powers of the military might of the United States.
Ultimately the “big stick” gave way to “dollar diplomacy“, but probably in name only. Through dollar diplomacy, the U.S. government encouraged U.S. businesses to invest in Latin American countries, an encouragement that carried with it the assumption that those business interests would be protected by the U.S. government, even by military force if necessary.
It also carried with it the assumption that major U.S. business investment in the relatively limited economies of Latin American nations would give those businesses significant clout in the governmental policies of those countries.
This clout would translate into the ability of the United States to influence the domestic and foreign policies of those countries toward a pro-U.S. attitude. If that clout failed, the U.S. might view the situation as “unstable” and intervene under the authority of the Roosevelt Corollary.
As the United States emerged from World I and moved toward a less aggressive foreign policy, dollar diplomacy and the Roosevelt Corollary remained in force.
Finally, in 1933 at the Montevideo Conference in Uruguay, the United States formally renounced the Roosevelt Corollary as Franklin Roosevelt attempted to usher in a “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America.
Specifically, the accord that emerged from the conference, signed by the U.S. in 1934, stated that “No state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another“. While the “good neighbor” policy might have looked good on paper, it didn’t stop U.S. intervention in Latin America.
Following World War II, the Cold War threw a new element, communism, into the mix. Continued economic domination by U.S. economic interests caused a build-up of resentment toward the U.S. government in many Latin American countries.
Coupled with this was the fact that the United States supported many repressive and corrupt Latin American regimes (as long as they were anti-communist) who cared little for the welfare of their people.
As a result, leftist candidates running on platforms of land reform and a more equitable distribution of income had great appeal to much of the population in those countries and a number of leftist candidates were democratically elected. Many of these candidates sought to take over, or nationalize the land and assets of U.S. companies.
At the urging of major U.S. business interests and extremely fearful of the spread of communism to the Western Hemisphere, the United States used overt military action and, more importantly, covert actions of the CIA to overthrow unfriendly but democratically elected leftist governments.
The classic example is the U.S. sponsored coup d’état in 1954 in Guatemala that overthrew a leftist government bent on nationalizing U.S. assets.
Military might was the only thing that gave the United States this authority. Following World War II, the United States enlarged that position and, as a super power assumed the position as policeman of the world.
So there you have it folks. What do you think?
Do you side with Teddy Roosevelt, who said the US should serve as police of the Western Hemisphere (Speak softly and carry a big stick)?
Or do you think his 5th cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had it right with his “Good Neighbor” policy?

 

In May 2018, Nicolas Maduro was re-elected to a second term as President of Venezuela in elections which have widely been dismissed as rigged.
At the prospect of another six years of Maduro government and with the economy in freefall, the head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, declared himself interim president on January 23, 2019.
Mr Guaidó argues that Mr Maduro is a “usurper” and that the presidency is therefore vacant, in which case the constitution calls for the head of the National Assembly to step in.
The US and more than 50 other countries have recognized Mr. Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela but Maduro’s key allies, Russia and China, have stuck by the Maduro.
The two sides have been locked in a stand-off since January with Guaidó trying to sway the military, a key player in the country, to switch its allegiance.
A government like Maduro’s might not last long in, say, France, because neighboring countries and the European Union would exert sufficient diplomatic, political and economic pressure to punish the rogue regime for its actions.
The Organization of American States has tried for two years to expel Venezuela because it is no longer a democracy. But member countries like Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua – all of which have strongman leaders support Maduro.
However, Latin American neighbors are not Venezuela’s main supporters. China and Russia are largely keeping Maduro’s bankrupt regime afloat by buying oil concessions and extending the repayment period on loans.
Therein lies the greatest problem we face in trying to help the Venezuelan people.
Sending American troops in to aid in overthrowing the Maduro regime could create a proxy war pitting the US against China and Russia.
I know what you are thinking. We have already been in that situation many times throughout our history.
The big difference here is that this war would be in our own hemisphere, and would require a completely different set of alliances than those we counted on in previous conflicts.
Russia and China, have warned the US not to intervene in support of the opposition leader Guaidó’s attempt to lead the country.
So what can be done?
It appears a group of mercenaries decided to solve the problem and make a little money to boot.
I found a great article on this plot in The Guardian written by
Julian Borger, Joe Daniels and Chris McGreal about something called “Operation Gideon”.
As get-rich-quick schemes go it was unusually complicated. Invade a foreign country you know little about. Abduct its president and take him to the US. Collect a $15million bounty from the US government – and maybe an even bigger payoff from the people who then seize power.
This seemed like a foolproof plan to a former US army staff sergeant, Jordan Goudreau, as he mapped it out in a luxury Miami apartment in late 2019. The 43-year-old Canadian-American was certain his years as a green beret in Iraq and Afghanistan had prepared him for the task.
And for the opponents of Maduro he was talking to, it must have sounded convincing – even after the failure of a previous coup attempt in 2019.
Representatives of Juan Guaidó – the opposition leader recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate president by the US and most of its allies – signed a fat contract engaging Goudreau to overthrow Maduro.

But in interviews with the Guardian, a senior opposition figure said they grew to doubt Goudreau and eventually broke with him months before he launched a disastrous raid this week that was similar to the botched 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
The flaws in his plan were laid bare as two bedraggled ex-US special forces soldiers were paraded alongside other members of the ragged invasion force.
Airan Berry and Luke Denman were captured at sea before they even set foot on Venezuelan soil.
Eight people were reported killed in the botched invasion and more than 100 others arrested. Berry and Denman later appeared on Venezuelan state television outlining the supposed plan to seize the presidential palace and take Maduro to the US.
Goudreau announced what he called a “daring, amphibious raid” on Sunday afternoon. It was codenamed Operation Gideon after a biblical story symbolizing the victory of a small military against a much stronger opponent.
“Our units have been activated in the south, west and in the east of Venezuela,” he said, dressed in a golf shirt and standing next to a former Venezuelan national guard captain wearing body armour, Javier Nieto Quintero.
But by then the plot had already fallen apart, not least because two days earlier the Associated Press had published a long investigation exposing the plan. If the AP knew it, it is likely the Venezuelan government did too.
Goudreau served in the Canadian military in the 1990s and studied at the University of Calgary before joining the US green berets. He spent 15 years as a medical sergeant, doing several stints in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After leaving the military Goudreau founded a security contractor, Silvercorp USA, in 2018. The company’s original plan was to provide guards to protect American schools from mass shootings.
Silvercorp’s website brags on a series of overblown claims including that Goudreau led “international security teams for the President of the United States” (he had provided private security at Trump political rallies).
Early in 2019 Goudreau was providing security for a concert in aid of Venezuelan refugees on the Colombian border organized by Richard Branson, the billionaire owner of the Virgin conglomerate. There he met Clíver Alcalá, a Venezuelan former general who defected to the opposition. The pair began talking about how to overthrow Maduro.
By September the plotting had progressed to a meeting in Miami between Goudreau and Juan José Rendón, a Venezuelan exile appointed by Guaidó to strategize ways of taking power.
Rendón was well known in Latin American politics. He resigned as a strategist in Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos’s re-election campaigns amid allegations that he accepted bribes from drug lords. He was also accused of attempting to manipulate Mexico’s 2012 election.
Guaidó had set up an advisory group to brainstorm ways to end the Maduro regime. Rendón’s job was to advise the commission on how to make that happen.
He said the commission explored all legal means of ousting Maduro, including piracy laws. The commission also interviewed security consultants, mostly ex-soldiers offering specialist services for astronomical fees.
“There were no limits – $1bn, $1.5bn,” Rendón told the Guardian.
Goudreau’s firm was asking for far less – about $213m from Venezuela’s future oil earnings and a $1.5m retainer.
“He was supposedly preparing something in Venezuela that would have gone through the Colombian border,” Rendón said.
Goudreau told the Venezuelans he had 800 men ready to invade.
A handful of meetings resulted in an agreement in October for “an operation to kidnap Nicolás Maduro … remove the current regime and install the recognized Venezuelan President Juan Guaidó”.
Goudreau has made public pages from the agreement – one of them signed by Guaidó. The would-be president has said that it is not his signature and has previously denied any involvement..
Rendón took the agreement seriously enough to pay Goudreau $50,000 of his own money to cover expenses.
Under the agreement Silvercorp had 45 days to train and equip the invasion force before teams of men would infiltrate Venezuela to seize key locations and buildings, and encourage a general uprising.
But Rendón soon came to doubt that Goudreau had the military resources or competence he claimed, and grew concerned by his erratic behavior – including his repeated demands for money.
Rendón showed the Guardian copies of increasingly angry texts he said were from Goudreau, demanding a $1.5m advance.
Neither Goudreau nor his lawyer returned calls seeking comment.
Rendón said he lost confidence in Goudreau because of his “character, his moods” and “lack of respect”. He said Guaidó also began to suspect that Goudreau was talking too much.
“He was meeting with people in Colombia before meeting with us that were related to groups that we don’t engage with – because they are related to the regime,” said Rendón.
The dispute over the $1.5m retainer came to a head in a blazing argument in November when Goudreau, and other exiles confronted Rendón at his Miami apartment.
Goudreau left without his money. Rendón said he heard nothing more until April when he received a lawyer’s letter demanding payment of the $1.5m.
Rendón was not the first person to back away from a deal with Goudreau. Drew White, who served with Goudreau, Berry and Denman in the Middle East, helped set up Silvercorp. But he pulled out in 2019 when Goudreau started cooking up the plan to abduct Maduro, deciding it was too far fetched.
Goudreau decided to press ahead anyway.
Preparations on the ground began to unravel in late March when Colombian police stopped Jorge Alberto Molinares driving along the Caribbean coast.
His car was packed with assault rifles, flak jackets and military helmets he was moving to a safe house in Riohacha, 55 miles from the Venezuelan border.
The authorities had begun watching the house after the landlord complained that the plotters had missed rent payments.
Molinares told investigators he was delivering the shipment to a man known as to “El Pantera”, or the Panther, who Venezuelan authorities said was Robert Colina Ibarra – who was killed in the botched invasion.
Goudreau’s plans were further complicated when his ally Alcalá, the former general, was indicted on drug trafficking charges.
Before turning himself over to authorities Alcalá told the Guardian that he was working with the knowledge of “American contractors and the Colombian government” though he would not go into further details.
Unveiling the indictments in March, US authorities also offered a $15m reward for information leading to Maduro’s capture and prosecution.
With the big payoff agreed with Rendón dead, that made a potential payout from the US government all the more important for Goudreau. (The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, raised eyebrows this week by denying “direct” involvement in the plot.)
After the would-be liberators of Venezuela were herded ashore on Sunday, Maduro claimed that his agents had infiltrated the operation long ago and were ready to pounce. “We knew everything,” he said. “What they ate, what they didn’t eat. What they drank. Who financed them.”
Guaidó said that if the Venezuelan president let the operation go ahead in that knowledge, he had blood on his hands. “Nicolás Maduro you are responsible. They knew about the operation, they infiltrated them and waited for them to massacre them,” he said.
Goudreau sounded more optimistic even as Operation Gideon collapsed around him.
“I’m out a lot of money, a lot,” he said this week. “A lot of us came together to do this. I’ve been a freedom fighter my whole life. This is all I know.”
So, here is the elephant in the room.
Did the US government know about Operation Gideon?
President Donald Trump on Tuesday denied his administration was somehow involved.
“I just got information. Nothing to do with our government, but I just got information on that. We’ll find out, we just heard about it. Whatever it is we’ll let you know, but it has nothing to do with our government,” he said.
Was a get rich quick plan by a group of wild mercenaries?
Was it a covert operation conducted by the US intelligence operatives?
If it was, do you support or oppose using such tactics against our enemies.
I for one say, if it works and can save the lives of innocent people, use whatever means are necessary. We have done it in the past in Mexico and throughout Central America.
Callers?