In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the terrorist ambush at a Dallas ICE facility, the air is thick with ponderings, questions, and speeches about how our society must “turn down” the heat, corral the wild rhetoric, and suppress “hate speech” if we’re going to end the violence. Or so say the very people who throw the words “Nazi” and “fascist” around like rice at a wedding, with no apparent understanding of what either word even means.
The other pressing question is how to find unity as a country. Interestingly, none of these thoughts are aired when the radical left and communist brigades go crazy, as they frequently do, burning entire city blocks down, destroying private property, and killing people. But I digress.
The now far-left Democrats have made it very clear since 2008 that “unity,” as they use the word, is achieved when the U.S. replaces individual rights with group rights, Constitutional protections with positive rights of entitlement, and a free market with a command economy — meanwhile deconstructing both faith and family.
Who Rules Whom?
How do we in fact live together in community, if we don’t share the same worldviews? How shall we live? Who decides? Who rules whom? How can two orthogonal truth claims meet? Ultimately, the discussion is more likely to lead to confusion and violence without the context of world history and the history of the American experiment.
The historical truth is that peace and unity have always been in short supply everywhere in every age. At the dawn of human civilization, violence and the lack of unity shattered the human family right out of the gate when Cain murdered Abel. And nothing has changed.
Out of Many, One
“E pluribus unum,” used on the Great Seal of the United States since 1782, was popularized as a symbol of the nation’s destiny. The new country was already, in contrast to England, diverse — with people of English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish descent, and African-Americans (some enslaved, some free).
It was human freedom, a vast, open continent, and the promise of the Revolution that drew diverse peoples – and the nation’s ideals offered unity. But questions over states’ rights and sovereignty, regional economics, particularly with the industrialization of the North, hapless and irresponsible politicians, and, of course, slavery, proved too great to surmount as the still-young nation grew. The terrible Civil War that came would take over 600,000 lives. Some would argue that it was not until two World Wars and the Great Depression that the country finally achieved a broad sense of unity, which the Civil War and its aftermath had failed to bring about.
President Lincoln believed that unification after the terrible war would be a process of forming a “more perfect union,” by reasserting the foundational values outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. At Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, with the war’s end still seventeen months away, Lincoln reminded the country that it was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” And he pledged that the dead
shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Only by returning to those ideals, he warned, would the nation find actual unity.
We’re Not Alone
As terrible as that Civil War was, it fit the pattern of history. An astounding 147 countries, or 70% of the world’s nations, have had civil wars in the last 75 years alone. Going back beyond the Roman Empire, civil wars and violence – most often multiple wars — have been a constant in human history, not an exception. Fewer than 10 nations have never experienced a civil war, mostly small principalities and tiny island nations. In contrast, China has experienced at least 40 civil wars throughout its history.
The echo of the founding and the creeds underpinned it, however much abused in the twentieth century, still lingers. However, the massive internal institutional attack during the latter half of the twentieth century — and continuing this century on steroids — began with the Frankfurt School and other organized Marxist-Leninist movements infiltrating American education, religion, and government, dramatically radicalizing the political landscape.
From the Antiwar Movement to the George Floyd Riots
The violence started in earnest with the communist-led anti-war riots and terrorist bombing campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s — which went almost unpunished. Now violence is seen as a go-to and “acceptable” tool by the radical Left. In the spirit of always blaming their opponents for doing what they actually do, the Left and its shills in the corporate media routinely insist that “right-wing” violence is the nation’s problem.
As many commentators have noted, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there were no riots, looting, burning buildings, or street mayhem. Instead, there was a revivalist-style memorial service filled with worship music, prayers, and a grieving widow forgiving her husband’s murderer.
Contrast that with the sad and controversial death of a lifelong felon, drug addict, and street thug, George Floyd, on May 25, 2020, who died during a controversial police arrest. Based on the autopsy, he was high on meth and fentanyl while resisting arrest for passing off a bogus $20 bill. During the summer and into the fall of the year, 68 cities and counties reported 2,385 incidents of looting and 624 incidents of arson, including 97 police vehicles burned. More than 2,000 law enforcement officers were injured, 17 people died, and the property damage was over $2 billion. There was virtually no reporting of the horrific violence in the mainstream, corporate media.
The contrast only reminds us of the precariousness of our times.
A Clash of Civilizations
The Western World, including the U.S., is engaged in a clash of civilizational aspirations that is irreconcilable short of God’s intervention. We believers are in a full-out battle with those who (knowingly or not) serve Darkness and Death.
For the conservative and orthodox voices in the West, this means returning to the protection and constant defense of human and economic freedom – the creation of wealth and prosperity for every member of society, as well as core individual rights to speech, free association, and religious liberty.
Today’s Left wants what totalitarians always want: absolute political power over the individual, the deconstruction of society, and the total erasure of the Judeo-Christian ethos across society. As witnessed time and again in the twentieth century, and China today, that includes raw force and imprisoning or killing those who insist on fighting for human freedom and basic individual rights.
It’s the fight we dare not lose.
Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.
