Today’s a good day to talk about treason.
It is a process well worth remembering on this day of historic American celebration.
First to keep in mind is the attitude of any State and its rulers towards treason, and those who embody the State through their formal position or office. They don’t like treason, and for good reason.
It offends them on a deep and fundamental level.
You can banter about betrayal or aid and comfort and levying war against your own people; while those are certainly aspects of it, they don’t touch on the real injury that is sustained to the heart of the ruler.
It’s well captured in a scene from Shōgun (the book and original 1980 miniseries, not the butchered Hulu version) where Blackthorne, an English pilot, is speaking of rebellion to Yoshi Toranaga, the absolute feudal lord who has him in captivity.
Toranaga is incensed and mortally, furiously offended.
“There are no mitigating circumstances when it comes to treason against one’s sovereign lord!”
Blackthorne, of course, has the dramatic and accurate rejoinder:
“Unless you win.”
The ice breaks, Toranaga laughs, and then agrees.
“Yes, Mister Foreigner with the impossible name, you have named the one mitigating circumstance.”
Benjamin Franklin is reported to have delivered (although historians dispute this) at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a pithy and equally accurate comment:
We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.
Are you ready to hang in any direction?
Evidently not.
Are you sick of a long train of abuses and usurpations at the hands of leaders who are no longer fairly elected, but cycle themselves through incestuous oligarchic placements with absolute disregard for the people over which they rule with intelligence agencies, politicized agencies, militarized law enforcement, and hideously grotesque social desecration that elevates surgically mutilated insanity and parceled satrapies to their gormless and ineffectual fellow travelers?
Not enough, clearly.
Why is this? What has happened to the United States of America, and what has happened to its natural born citizens that they are now ruled by foreigners, rootless cosmopolitans who have flung industry and meritocracy and national identity out the window to its death?
You know what’s happened.
Why have you permitted the plunge of your nation into incomprehensible, dizzying, and frighteningly unrecoverable and completely unsustainable debt while opening the uniformed ranks of law enforcement to criminal invaders who should never have been present within your borders in the first place?
You know why.
You’re afraid.
Completely.
Beaten.
Unless, of course, you aren’t. And unless you also understand the great and terrible truth that the delegation of power from “we the people” to the State is an abrogable military contract and not a forever sort of magic pinky-swear abrogation of natural rights designed to facilitate your liquidation from the global stage.
But yes, you’ll have to risk hanging if you want to change it.
You’ll have to win, too, or you’ll very definitely hang.
John Carter of Postcards From Barsoom covers this in far more depth in his post titled very simply, Fear:
Over twenty years ago now, we declared war on terror; a generation later, we are ruled by terror. The public discourse revolves around peoples’ fears, most of them imagined. Many spend their lives petrified at the prospect of normal social interaction. Women are scared that men will rape them, and men are scared that women will rape them in the courts. Both leftists and rightists are terrified that the other, if given free rein, will drag the world into a dark age, though only one of them is right. All of our great public efforts are either to mitigate this future catastrophe or that dire present threat, or they are about furiously not acknowledging some insoluble and therefore inevitable future disaster, while studiously ignoring some entirely soluble ongoing emergency which those who could solve delude themselves they can profit from.
Used to be that Americans were proud of their identity, and were willing to spit on their hands and ensure that victory was ever achieved under Old Glory.
I’m not going to belabor the point today.
It’s not about exhortation, but about reminding you of what you used to be.
Men who were willing to blow gunfire into the chests and faces of their sovereign lords, without reserve or hesitation or shame.
Men who meant it when they wrote these words:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Rights and duties, you see.
Prerogatives and sacred purpose.
You bear duty of the State, for that is what makes men free.
Think on this today, amid your hotdogs and beer and fireworks.
Consider your shame as you witness prancing naked churls flapping rainbows in your face, and the lethal pronouncements of death upon your heritage that their intransigent and monstrously corrupted leaders fling.
Remember Major General John Stark, who commanded American forces at the Battle of Bennington:
The hottest engagement I have ever witnessed, resembling a continual clap of thunder.
Later, on, his famous words were known to all and sundry:
Live free or die.
He was willing to hang for it, and he meant it when his closing words, forgotten by everyone, were written in harsh and accurate recognition:
Death is not the worst of evils.
Get sick of evil, and get up and walk.
You’re getting the worst of it so far by evil design and with your own facilitation.
If you want your nation back, you must be willing to injure the hearts of rulers.
You must be willing to strike existential, mortal fear into their dishonorable black gulf.
If you don’t mean it, you’re just a slave pretending to be something more than chattel.
And you’ll be hanged separately, because you’re afraid of being free.
Americans were never cowards before, and they don’t deserve to be cowards now.
Imagine what can be, and then look firmly to what comes in November and after.
Things will never be the same; and you know in your heart the long game of tyrants is collapsing again. It’s just how it is, and how the epoch turns in this very day.
Read the Company white paper Age of Militants. You’ll discover the road out.
Are you that certain kind of man, the one who fears collapse of honor more than troubled safety and the grave and murderous effort that comes with duty of the State?
Are you one of the People, or are you not?
Those who are not, gather to rule you with lust for your final subjugation.
Ropes are terrific things.
Rather than wait for one to serve as final hoist around your neck and your people and your nation, learn to gather and throw them to your brothers.
That’s how you win, my friend.
That is how you throw gasping horror and outrage into the hearts of tyrants:
You have to dare the greatest offense against your sovereign lord, and win.
That is the Way, and there is no other.
Don’t bother to argue with me.
Argue with history, if you like. But don’t kid yourself.
Do you want your nation back?
Fuck you, earn it.
Grand rising!