Originally Posted by
David A. Rowe
Absolutely, Rip. I know what you're saying, and I rarely reply to you because I agree with the essence of what you say. Maybe not the gut shots or lamp posts, but I also earnestly believe you're not happy about those ideas. I'm also not naive to the fact that destruction and death aren't the likeliest option, but are always just around the corner. Always and everywhere.
I agree with you that cities must burn themselves out, and that it will be blood on the hands of their voters and not only the politicians. I was invoking General William T. Sherman to Professor David Boyd as he attended seminary in Louisiana that would later become LSU:
"You, you the people of the South, believe there can be such a thing as peaceable secession. You don't know what you are doing. I know there can be no such thing. ... If you will have it, the North must fight you for its own preservation. Yes, South Carolina has by this act precipitated war. ... This country will be drenched in blood. God only knows how it will end. Perhaps the liberties of the whole country, of every section and every man will be destroyed, and yet you know that within the Union no man's liberty or property in all the South is endangered. ... Oh, it is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization. ... You people speak so lightly of war. You don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing. I know you are a brave, fighting people, but for every day of actual fighting, there are months of marching, exposure and suffering. More men die in war from sickness than are killed in battle. At best war is a frightful loss of life and property, and worse still is the demoralization of the people. ...
"You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people, but an earnest people and will fight too, and they are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it.
"Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The Northern people not only greatly outnumber the whites at the South, but they are a mechanical people with manufactures of every kind, while you are only agriculturists--a sparse population covering a large extent of territory, and in all history no nation of mere agriculturists ever made successful war against a nation of mechanics. ...
"The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth--right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.
"At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, and shut out from the markets of Europe by blockade as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. ... if your people would but stop and think, they must see that in the end you will surely fail."
General Sherman hated war as intensely as I hate war -- maybe moreso. And he burned everything between the Mason Dixon line and the sea down, including Atlanta. Not because he was vengeful or murderous, but because he knew it was necessary to crush the idea that had possessed people.
I don't speak for every veteran, but every veteran I know is disgusted with the decadence, lack of action and the insanity of Marxism that is ruining the last bastion of Liberty, and the homes of our families, that we fought to protect. I imagine I feel like a Roman Triarius prepared to fight other Romans on Roman soil. Even should the government, police and citizens of this country collapse and surrender -- we will be here to do what must be done, and it will be entirely different if we do. Which is why General Sherman is so important right now:
"I confess without shame that I am tired & sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. Even success, the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies […] It is only those who have not heard a shot, nor heard the shrills & groans of the wounded & lacerated (friend or foe) that cry aloud for more blood & more vengeance, more desolation & so help me God as a man & soldier I will not strike a foe who stands unarmed & submissive before me but will say ‘Go sin no more.’"
And again
"In our country ... one class of men makes war and leaves others to figure it out."
And again
"I am satisfied, and have been all the time, that the problem of this war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory."
And again
"You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop..."
I'll stop now. Because I could quote General Sherman all day, and each one would be as equally valid and applicable to right this moment as these.
I'm begging everyone in our country, and especially the Marxists -- do NOT take this battle to the veterans. We are accustomed to death, and we do not retreat.
"res ad triarios venit"