Our "Overlords" Should Not Expect an Easy Populace to Rule
Article by J.B. Shurk in The American Thinker
Our "Overlords" Should Not Expect an Easy Populace to Rule
There
is a suffocating feeling of dread in the air — a palpable fear among
many Americans that freedom is on its way out. I truly get that. State
and corporate authoritarianism has taken over. Little fascists patrol
the public square looking for dissent to whatever contrived politically
correct nonsense the cultural Marxists conjure up next. Members of
Congress malign those who don't submit to the left's delusions as Hitler
clones reborn, while the news media and tech behemoths goose-step right
behind our Big Government overlords, finding new ways to demonize
ordinary Americans who want nothing more than just to be left
alone. And too many Republican Party officeholders (who were elected to
fight the good fight) have hidden under their desks while the socialist
monster grew, sprinted in the opposite direction far from the fields of
battle, or already submitted their résumés and bona fides to the new
Soviet class taking over.
Our
tormentors will not leave us alone. Worse, we know that our children
and grandchildren will be fighting once again the battles we hoped would
stay secured away in the past. To fight for freedom is no easy thing,
and we are now painfully reminded that preserving freedom is just as
hard.
Some
share of the human species always feels compelled to rule over
others. Those who chase power are not content until they dominate every
other human in body, mind, and spirit. Monarchical dynasties,
philosopher-kings, banking oligarchs, proletarian vanguards, or Silicon
Valley tech lords — it doesn't matter what you call them. At the end of
the day, they're just people who desire to rule over other people.
The
reason the growing totalitarianism in America feels so unnatural — and
the reason why America has always been so exceptional — is that for two
and a half centuries, one generation of Americans after the next has
fought the human impulse to dominate others by empowering the individual
at the tyrant's expense. Americans possess no better genes than any
other nation extant or long dead, but they have built a system that
swallowed unchecked power and fortified the spirits of free men. They
endured British invasion, civil war, the Industrial Revolution, and a
century of world wars and global terrorism while keeping the torch for
human freedom lit, even if its light sometimes dimmed more than we would
have liked. A nation built from the ground up that advanced both
individual freedom and general welfare (and not merely the welfare of an
aristocratic class) has succeeded only once, and in doing so, the
United States of America has done more to destroy the shackles of class
and unleash personal opportunity than any magic dreamt by the likes of
Bernie Sanders and Karl Marx.
That
so many Americans plagued by ignorance, malice, or spite are now
dragging the rest of us back to an age when what you have, what you say,
and what you may become will once again be arbitrated solely by the
State and its agents is a tragedy felt by anyone wise enough to know how
difficult and rare it is for humans to remain free. We can't help but
mourn because to recognize what is being taken from each one of us is
also to acknowledge that the long cycle in the struggle for human
freedom has started over yet again.
But
I beg you not to give in to despair's temptations and instead to
remember that history is replete with moments such as these, when all
seems lost just before all seems destined. Many of those moments
occurred along America's journey. Is staring down the specter of global
government today any more daunting than facing the British Empire at
the height of its global power in the eighteenth century? Is fighting
censorship today any more difficult than when quill pens and secret
messages were essential in sustaining hope against almost certain defeat
during nearly a decade of war for independence? Does the Supreme
Court's last century of rewriting the Constitution's plain meaning seem
more vexing than the reality of unifying a nation under the Articles of
Confederation, throwing the whole thing out, and starting from scratch
before the nation could even enjoy peace? Does China's ignominious
control over too many of our politicians and corporations seem any more
terrifying than the repeated British attempts after the Treaty of Paris —
from the War of 1812 all the way to our own Civil War — to claw back
its former possessions?
It
is sometimes comforting to think of America's story as written in
stone, but almost every leg of her existence has been threatened by
those who would conquer her from abroad and those who would sabotage her
from within. However insurmountable the rise of the new Sovietism in
America feels, it cannot feel worse than the frostbite and psychological
exhaustion of Valley Forge or Bastogne, or the fatigue and loneliness
of Guadalcanal or the Pusan Perimeter. And in some ways, all of the
struggles for freedom in America's past make it that much easier to
continue the struggle for freedom in America's future. Unlike the
Americans fighting the British at Yorktown or during the Battle of
Baltimore thirty-three years later, we know exactly what extraordinary
deeds America and Americans would go on to achieve. Surely, the men and
women who sacrificed greatly for American liberty while knowing so
little about its rewards endured more than us whose liberty is now
threatened but who have already benefited greatly from its rewards.
Whenever
the weight of what lies ahead feels heavy, I always place myself in the
shoes of those who seem so intent on controlling us, and I ask myself
this: would I really want to rule over a bunch of "live free or die,"
"come and take it," cowboy Americans who, now that they've finally
awoken to the tyrannical threats all around them, will find a great deal
of pleasure in sticking it to their tormentors every chance they
get? Americans who fully understand the price of freedom are not easily
domesticated beasts, and if I had to occupy any population on the
planet, the last group of people I'd want to force into submission is a
continent-wide mass of stubborn, contrarian liberty junkies who know
that God's law, not man's, still rules the day.
Nothing
about Marxist socialism is preordained. Subduing a population exposed
to freedom is still no easy task. And attempting to rule a country of
rowdy Americans for any length of time will still make fools of those
who try.
