"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they called it." -- 1984, George Orwell, 1948
We are literally living in a dystopian novel, a kind of combination between 1984, Brave New World, and Foundation.
We are literally living in a dystopian novel, a kind of combination between 1984, Brave New World, and Foundation.
I posted last week that Animal Farm, 1984, and Atlas Shrugged have become documentaries.
5.56mm
Did you take the blue pill or the red pill?
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Extinction of slavery was expected by all and regretted by none, although loss of slaves destroyed the value of land. Existing since the earliest colonization of the Southern States, the institution was interwoven with the thoughts, habits, and daily lives of both races, and both suffered by the sudden disruption of the accustomed tie. Bank stocks, bonds, all personal property, all accumulated wealth, had disappeared. Thousands of houses, farm-buildings, work-animals, flocks and herds, had been wantonly burned, killed, or carried off. The land was filled with widows and orphans crying for aid, which the universal destitution prevented them from receiving. Humanitarians shuddered with horror and wept with grief for the imaginary woes of Africans; but their hearts were as adamant to people of their own race and blood. These had committed the unpardonable sin, had wickedly rebelled against the Lord’s anointed, the majority. Blockaded during the war, and without journals to guide opinion and correct error, we were unceasingly slandered by our enemies, who held possession of every avenue to the world’s ear.
Famine and pestilence have ever followed war, as if our Mother Earth resented the defilement of her fair bosom by blood, and generated fatal diseases to punish humanity for its crimes. But there fell upon the South a calamity surpassing any recorded in the annals or traditions of man. An article in the “North American Review,” from the pen of Judge Black, well describes this new curse, the carpet-baggers, as worse than Attila, scourge of God. He could only destroy existing fruits, while, by the modern invention of public credit, these caterans stole the labor of unborn generations. Divines, moralists, orators, and poets throughout the North commended their thefts and bade them God-speed in spoiling the Egyptians; and the reign of these harpies is not yet over. Driven from the outworks, they hold the citadel. The epithet of August, first applied to the mighty Julius and to his successor Octavius, was continued, by force of habit, to the slobbering Claudius; and so of the Senate of the United States, which august body contained in March last several of these freebooters.
Honest men regarded them as monsters, generated in the foul ooze of a past era, that had escaped destruction to linger in a wholesomer age; and their speedy extinction was expected, when another, the most hideous of the species, was admitted. This specimen had been kept by force of bayonets for four years upon the necks of an unwilling people, had no title to a seat in the Senate, and was notoriously despised by every inhabitant of the State which he was seated to misrepresent. The Senators composing the majority by which this was done acted under solemn oaths to do the right; but the Jove of party laughs at vows of politicians. Twelve years of triumph have not served to abate the hate of the victors in the great war. The last presidential canvass was but a crusade of vengeance against the South. The favorite candidate of his party for the nomination, though in the prime of vigor, had not been in the field, to which his eloquent appeals sent thousands, but preferred the pleasanter occupation of making money at home. He had converted the power of his great place, that of Speaker of the House of Representatives, into lucre, and was exposed. By mingled chicanery and audacity he obtained possession of his own criminating letters, flourished them in the face of the House, and, in the Cambyses vein, called on his people to rally and save the luster of his loyalty from soil at the hands of rebels; and they came. From all the North ready acclaims went up, and women shed tears of joy, such as in King Arthur’s day rewarded some peerless deed of Galahad. In truth, it was a manly thing to hide dishonorable plunder beneath the prostrate body of the South. The Emperor Commodus, in full panoply, met in the arena disabled and unarmed gladiators. The servile Romans applauded his easy victories. Ancient Pistol covers with patches the ignoble scabs of a corrupt life. The vulgar herd believes them to be wounds received in the Gallic wars, as it once believed in the virtue and patriotism of Marat and Barrère.
In the Sermon on the Mount, the Divine Moralist instructed his hearers to forgive those who had injured them; but He knew too well the malice of the human heart to expect them to forgive those whom they had injured. The leaders of the radical masses of the North have inflicted such countless and cruel wrongs on the Southern people as to forbid any hope of disposition or ability to forgive their victims; and the land will have no rest until the last of these persecutors has passed into oblivion.
During all these years the conduct of the Southern people has been admirable. Submitting to the inevitable, they have shown fortitude and dignity, and rarely has one been found base enough to take wages of shame from the oppressor and maligner of his brethren. Accepting the harshest conditions and faithfully observing them, they have struggled in all honorable ways, and for what? For their slaves? Regret for their loss has neither been felt nor expressed. But they have striven for that which brought our forefathers to Runnymede, the privilege of exercising some influence in their own government. Yet we fought for nothing but slavery, says the world, and the late Vice-President of the Confederacy, Mr. Alexander Stephens, reëchoes the cry, declaring that it was the corner-stone of his Government.
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Now that Federal bayonets have been turned from her bosom, this poison, the influence of three fourths of a million of negro voters, will speedily ascend and sap her vigor and intelligence. Greed of office, curse of democracies, will impel demagogues to grovel deeper and deeper in the mire in pursuit of ignorant votes. Her old breed of statesmen has largely passed away..
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...respect for the memories and deeds of our ancestors is security for the present, seed-corn for the future; and, in the language of Burke, “Those will not look forward to their posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”
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Traditions are mighty influences in restraining peoples. The light that reaches us from above takes countless ages to traverse the awful chasm separating us from its parent star; yet it comes straight and true to our eyes, because each tender wavelet is linked to the other, receiving and transmitting the luminous ray. Once break the continuity of the stream, and men will deny its heavenly origin, and seek its source in the feeble glimmer of earthly corruption.
THE END
Richard Taylor was born to one of America’s most prominent military families. His grandfather, Richard Lee Taylor, had served in the American Revolution, while his father, Zachary Taylor, rode military fame all the way to the White House in 1840. During Mexican-American War, Taylor was a military secretary for his famous father.
When the Civil War broke out, Taylor began quickly rising through the ranks, leading a regiment at the Battle of First Bull Run. Taylor had all the right connections, but he was a skilled leader, quickly becoming a brigadier general under Stonewall Jackson, serving during the renowned Shenandoah Valley Campaign in 1862.
Taylor, Richard. Destruction and Reconstruction: Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War