We commemorate this date, upon which, eleven score and twelve years ago, Congress authorized the Declaration of Independence, to have it sent off to the English, to give some sense of formality to the American rebellion. In some senses it’s an arbitrary date, but while the Declaration was not written or signed on this date, July 4 is when the nation put its weight behind it.
Like all conflicts, it was a complex situation in which the good guys were not perfect. In the long list of offenses cited in the Declaration, some of them were heavily exaggerated. That’s an honest statement. I’ll point out that this isn’t high on the list of most modern postliberals, because since postliberalism is not too friendly to monarchists, breaking free of monarchic rule was a good enough reason for this type.
But that wasn’t the only reason, or even necessarily the best reason, because monarchy is not inherently evil. It may be argued that the system has inferior safeguards against malignant rulership, which is why throwing off monarchy was one valid reason, but not a sufficiently good reason by itself to wage rebellion. The fact was that the French and Indian Wars created a mess. British troops made a significant contribution to defending the Colonies in the last of the four wars, and therein lies the problem of obsessing over who is to blame.
If you start with the French and Indian War (the last of four wars collectively called, in the US, the French and Indian Wars- plural), the British made a significant contribution in the Colonies’ defense, and they probably had a right, from that perspective, to demand that the Colonies pay their part of the bill. On the other hand, it is not as if Colonial militias did not do their part.
If you start with the first three of the French and Indian Wars, the perspective shifts. The Colonies had already suffered three times from the fallout of European politics and from that perspective, it could be said that the English contribution to the fourth war was just payment for what they indirectly inflicted in the previous wars.
But the root of the problem was Europe and their colonialist imperialism. They created populations of people politically and economically bound to the mother country, who were at the same time separated by huge geographic distance and the corresponding alienation from the mother country’s local affairs. It was a recipe for disaster, and America stood up and put an end to that. We didn’t do everything right all at once: The United States was a confederacy before it was a federal republic, and the reason that change happened was because the Articles of Confederation were a flop. We were not able to get rid of slavery right away – it took nearly a hundred years to finish that, and a hundred more to clean up the cultural residue.
We got through two world wars. We endured and won a Cold War without allowing it to go nuclear. We went to the moon- something that was once considered impossible, but now only by mad conspiracy theorists. In many respects, we have stood up to the test of history.
In other respects, we are faltering. On September 11, 2001, the world was freshly reacquainted with an ancient madness. About fourteen centuries ago, there was a man in Arabia who claimed to speak for God. Centuries earlier, Jesus of Nazareth said “My kingdom is not of this world” and “Render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and render to God that which is God’s”– words that even those who are not Christian can appreciate as affirming a separation between religious affairs and affairs of the state. This other man claimed the authority to establish God’s rule on Earth; he claimed the authority to have it enforced by human agencies. In this man’s version of divine law, those who turn away from what he proclaimed to be the true faith must be put to death. In this man’s version of divine law, self-restraint is not regarded as a virtue, for women must be subjected to the most extreme standards of modesty or else they may be raped, and no man can be convicted of rape without four male witnesses. Consider how likely it would be for there to be that many witnesses. In this man’s version of divine law, it is permissible to wage war to subjugate the farthest reaches of the world to this law, and he preached that the highest rewards of Paradise, consisting of the most exquisite carnal pleasures, are reserved to those who commit themselves to the cause of war. This man’s name was Muhammad ibn Abdullah, and his message attracted many, for they found within that message the justification for terrible aggression.
The Byzantine Empire was crushed. Though Europe was able to stand its ground militarily, the disciples of Muhammad waged piracy against their various navies, ceasing only at the payment of sufficient tribute, with increasing prices over the years. It was, in part, this reason that caused Europe to launch so many voyages to the west, first to seek out a westward passage to India, and then to make use of the vast territories of the Americas and their own unique resources. And eventually we come once again to July 4, 1776, when a certain group of English colonies in North America, in Congress assembled, authorized the document that declared themselves a nation.
Those, who strive in the way of Muhammad to extend the supremacy of his religion of submission, did not first attack the United States in 2001. In 1784 the United States was responsible for its own protection after our arrangements with France expired, and the Muslim states of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli began to harass American trade in the Atlantic. Without a proper navy, the U.S. decided the best option for the time being was to pay the tribute– until a bill was sent to us in 1801, upon the inauguration of President Thomas Jefferson, from the Pasha of Tripoli, for about 2 percent of the entire national budget. Jefferson told the Pasha where he could stick it, so the Pasha declared war. The United States sent a fleet and began to raid and blockade Tripoli. Eventually, in 1805 the Pasha offered his terms which we accepted at the cost of having to pay ransom for the Americans taken prisoner, and abandoning our support for reinstating the Pasha’s deposed brother which we had promised to do.
But keep in mind the justification the Barbary states claimed for demanding this tribute:
It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.
- Ambassador of Tripoli Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, as relayed by Thomas Jefferson
For a time, the disciples of Muhammad trembled, until in 1812 America was forced into a rematch with Britain, which was at war with France under Napoleon. Because the U.S. was trying to maintain trade with the French, the British had their reasons for opposing it and taking increasingly drastic actions against American sailors. Incidentally, it was Napoleon who seized Malta in 1798, driving out the Knights of Malta, who had previously maintained a Mediterranean navy that kept the Barbary pirates busy, so both Barbary Wars were indirectly Napoleon’s fault.
When the U.S. Navy was forced to pay full attention to the British, Algiers decided to resume the demands for tribute and declare war. Until the War of 1812 was concluded, the U.S. paid up, until 1815 when the Second Barbary War was swiftly brought to an end.
Things went quietly, generally speaking, until World War I, in which the Ottoman Empire was defeated and its territories divided, giving the territories of Palestine and Jordan to British occupation. The British set about arranging for Palestine to be set apart as a homeland for the Jews, but it wasn’t until the rise of Nazism, in which Adolf Hitler organized the slaughter of 6 million Jews and 5 million others, that Jews began seeking to take refuge in Palestine en masse. This upset a lot of Arabs, and when the new United Nations tried to partition the Palestine-Jordan territory, the Arab states rejected it. When the State of Israel was proclaimed in 1948, the Arabs attacked and much of the Arab population in Israel fled out. Following that war, hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven out of Arab lands, into Israel. The fact that Israel is there at all is an offense to the disciples of Muhammad, who taught that a territory once Muslim shall always be Muslim, and recaptured if it is taken away. The establishment is known to this day to Arabs as the Disaster. Those who strive in the way of Muhammad do not possess the vocabulary to acknowledge the independence of any infidel.
Now, using the establishment of Israel as their rallying call, the most radically orthodox of Muslims have sworn vengeance against the West, and in the modern world where one can go almost anywhere in the world within two days and communicate with almost anyone else in the world instantaneously, geographic separation is no guarantee of safety. Increasingly audacious terrorist attacks through the 20th century culminated in the strike of September 11, 2001.
An ambiguous “War on Terror” promised swift retaliation against al Qaeda and their hosts the Taliban in Afghanistan, yet we permitted the new Afghan constitution to give deference to the laws of Muhammad, and now they are still raping and murdering women for exposing such tantalizing parts of their body as the hair, lower leg, or neck; they are still murdering people who convert to other religions; and as prime evidence of their inability to distinguish matters of religion from matters of state, Taliban guerillas captured a group of Christian missionaries from Korea and held them hostage in order to force South Korea to withdraw their military presence from Afghanistan.
Then, in a move that was more difficult to justify, Iraq was invaded, and once again the new constitution gave special consideration to the laws of Muhammad, and once again the imams are gradually regaining their boldness. Though our Army is efficiently dealing with the direct terrorist threat, the fundamental doctrines that led to that threat in the first place remain unchallenged.
Just as those who follow the path of Muhammad are, because of their aggressively expansionist doctrines, incapable of acknowledging the phenomenon of losing territory, we the Americans are, because of our doctrine of freedom of religion, incapable of acknowledging the phenomenon of a religion that is doctrinally bound to a worldly political system.
Because of that failure, the world is faltering. We don’t possess the will to say “Yes, you can believe what you want, even believe you are commanded by your god to enslave the world, have your way with any woman who doesn’t put herself in a bag, and stone homosexuals. But if you try to actually do any of that, we will have to kill you,” because some people like the Council for American Islamic Relations will actually construe that as a bigoted statement, and worse, we will believe them, and have people fired over making statements like that. We will allow these people, who come out against anyone who scrutinizes any malicious activity on the part of a Muslim even when it turns out to be a genuine terroristic attack or pre-terroristic exercise, to help in reeducating our police officers and federal agents to avoid assuming, in any operational sense, a correlation between Islam and terrorism.
Unless we can refocus ourselves, identify the real source of the terror against which we claim to be waging war, and strike at its heart, this great nation that has endured this long may yet perish from the earth. The freedoms that our forefathers fought to establish, and many brave men afterwards fought to keep, demand nothing less.
Note here: Yes, it’s late. That’s what happens when I, the procrastinating little asshole, wait until the actual day to think of composing a post. It took all day to put together, so it’s now the 5th of July where I live. Though it’s still the 4th in Arizona, at time of posting.
