“Who the hell do they think they are? Stop pretending. Realize that you enjoy the rights God gave you only to the extent that your fellow ex-citizens recognize them, and that your only hope of continuing enjoyment lies in leaguing with them, on turning your back on the oligarchy and on effectively living republican lives with similarly minded people.”--Professor Angelo Codevilla, American
The True Origins of ‘America First’ › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)
This essay is adapted from “America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams” (Encounter, 288 pages, $30.99).
John Quincy Adams is the font of American geopolitical thought. Today, lesser men fail to grasp his teaching that alignment of interests among nations can only be creatures of time and circumstance.
Putting America First always meant defending that way of life.
The FoundersIn the first six of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay summarized the opinions about foreign affairs common in the mass media of the day—sermons and newspapers. Foremost, Americans wanted peace. In Federalist 3, Jay wrote that peace being Americans’ objective, we must neither insult nor injure foreigners. That means minding our own business. And in Federalist 4, he wrote that peace would also depend on readiness to punish foreigners’ interference in our affairs. In Federalist 6, Hamilton pointed out that since wars arise from ubiquitous, unpredictable causes and circumstances, Americans must be ever ready to fight. The founders also knew that, as other nations were surely going to fight among themselves, Americans had better be careful lest they be drawn into others’ quarrels. More than a century later, Theodore Roosevelt summed all this up in homespun terms: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
No sooner had the Constitution come into being than the quarter century of the French Revolution’s wars became the crucible in which the American people’s international character was forged. George Washington’s 1793 proclamation of neutrality in those wars, seconded by Alexander Hamilton’s Pacificus and Americanus essays, and young John Quincy Adams’ Marcellus, laid the theoretical base. Washington’s 1796 farewell address warned against the domestic temptations that entice us to set aside our geographic good fortune and common sense. “Why quit our own to stand on foreign ground?” Washington asked. “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations,” he adjured. He argued that neutrality with regard to others’ business is the other side of intense focus on our own. By contrast, confusing other nations’ interests with our own, he said, sets us against one another.
Since Washington’s statecraft aimed foremost at uniting Americans, he was careful—even when waging a war in which a significant part of the population sided with the enemy—to treat all as if they were loyal citizens.
Washington never tired of urging his fellow citizens to have arm’s-length relationships with foreign nations and to back them up with a respectable army. His successor, John Adams, fathered the U.S. Navy. The lead ship thereof, the U.S.S. Constitution, is still in commission.
In 1777, John Adams took his son, 10-year-old John Quincy, on his diplomatic mission to secure military aid from France and loans from Holland. The boy grew up fast—mastering perfect French and Dutch, helping his father, and conversing with statesmen. In 1781, when Charles Francis Dana was appointed to represent the United States in Saint Petersburg, 14-year-old J. Q. Adams accompanied him as his secretary. Since Dana spoke no French—the language of Russia’s elites—J. Q. effectively transacted the embassy’s business for two years. In 1784, when John Adams became America’s representative to King George III, 17-year-old John Quincy functioned as his father’s deputy. That was before entering Harvard, and then studying law. In 1794, George Washington appointed John Quincy Adams minister to the Netherlands. Successive presidents then sent him to represent the United States in Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain. In the course of these duties, he also became fluent in German, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. Since earliest youth, he had read the Latin and Greek classics.
As secretary of state (1817–1825), J. Q. Adams summed up and personified what America’s unique people would have to do to live peacefully among diverse nations. As we will see, although Adams did not invent any principles of statecraft, neither adding to nor subtracting from what Washington, Hamilton, and his father had prescribed, his dispatches, diary, and memoirs specified and applied their principles in a way that constitutes a comprehensive course of instruction for international relations in general, and for American statecraft in particular.
Adams shared, specified, and conveyed to his successors the founding generation’s fundamental interest in preserving and enhancing America’s own character. He sought occasions for reminding other nations—but especially our own—of the principles that make America what it is. Doing this encourages us to carefully consider how any decision we make in international affairs affects what is most important to ourselves as well as to others.
Adams is the font of American geopolitical thought. The reader should pay particular attention to Adams’ primordial distinction between America’s own interests—hence the “causes” for which Americans might fight—as well as to the (largely geographic) bases for evaluating the extent to which any cause or interest may be our own. The peoples on our borders and on the islands around us concern us most, followed by the oceans, then the rest of the world. Diplomatic experience had also taught Adams that, where the interests of nations coincide, negotiated agreements are scarcely necessary, and that when interests do not coincide, agreements are not worth the paper they are written on. That is why Adams practiced and taught a meticulous sort of diplomacy that aims at the mutual clarification of objectives.
John Quincy Adams considered the treaty that extended the United States’ border to the Pacific Ocean to have been his great achievement, alongside having established good relations with the governments of Britain, Russia, and so forth, in full acknowledgment of the radical differences between their regimes and ours. Adams had not invented the principle of mutual non-interference. That principle is, after all, the essence of the 1648 treaties of Westphalia. But Adams’ formulation of the Monroe Doctrine established non-interference as American foreign policy’s operational core.
The Legacy
Perhaps nothing shows how thoroughly Adams’ ways had conquered American statesmen’s minds as does his successor Andrew Jackson’s conduct. Jackson had beaten Adams in a bitter election. No two Americans could have been more different. Nevertheless, like Adams, Jackson combined commitment to peace and harmony with near-reflexive retaliation to physical attacks on Americans and on America’s honor. Like Adams, Jackson was about enhancing America. But despite being a man of the sword, his attempts to gain additional territory from Mexico were limited to offers of purchase, just as Adams’ had been. And though President Jackson owned slaves, his refusal to admit Texas as a slave state and his forceful stand against South Carolina’s attempt to nullify federal law were as forceful as Adams’ would have been. America’s greatness had been Adams’ great objective—a greatness that could not be purchased by unjust war or by any sacrifice of its principles.
In short, John Quincy Adams had codified the founding generation’s principles in foreign affairs into a set of practices by statesmen and expectations on the part of the public. That is why even the far-lesser statesmen in the years preceding the Civil War adhered to the Adams paradigm, if—as in the case of the Mexican War (1846–48)—only ineptly and hypocritically. To wit: President Polk did not intend to start the Mexican War; he resisted pressures to take over Mexico for nation-building, and paid Mexico the price he would have paid to purchase what he conquered. Meanwhile, presidents between Jackson and Lincoln delivered peaceful adjustment of interests with the rest of mankind.
Abraham Lincoln’s first major speech expressed his quintessentially American approach to international affairs: “All the armies in the world led by a Bonaparte, disposing of the earth’s treasure, our own excepted, could not take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.” Only Americans, he said, can truly hurt America. And they can do that only by putting their own passions and interests against America itself. That is why, as discord led to secession, Lincoln adjured the South not to start the war. Both Northerners and Southerners, he said, must think of themselves as Americans, first.
Because Lincoln kept in mind Washington’s commitment to treating fellow Americans as citizens, he aimed his conduct of the Civil War at reconciliation from start to finish. All manner of war aroused Lincoln’s deepest fears. “Peace among ourselves and with all nations” was the star by which he steered."
No sooner had the Constitution come into being than the quarter century of the French Revolution’s wars became the crucible in which the American people’s international character was forged. George Washington’s 1793 proclamation of neutrality in those wars, seconded by Alexander Hamilton’s Pacificus and Americanus essays, and young John Quincy Adams’ Marcellus, laid the theoretical base. Washington’s 1796 farewell address warned against the domestic temptations that entice us to set aside our geographic good fortune and common sense. “Why quit our own to stand on foreign ground?” Washington asked. “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations,” he adjured. He argued that neutrality with regard to others’ business is the other side of intense focus on our own. By contrast, confusing other nations’ interests with our own, he said, sets us against one another.
Since Washington’s statecraft aimed foremost at uniting Americans, he was careful—even when waging a war in which a significant part of the population sided with the enemy—to treat all as if they were loyal citizens.
Washington never tired of urging his fellow citizens to have arm’s-length relationships with foreign nations and to back them up with a respectable army. His successor, John Adams, fathered the U.S. Navy. The lead ship thereof, the U.S.S. Constitution, is still in commission.
In 1777, John Adams took his son, 10-year-old John Quincy, on his diplomatic mission to secure military aid from France and loans from Holland. The boy grew up fast—mastering perfect French and Dutch, helping his father, and conversing with statesmen. In 1781, when Charles Francis Dana was appointed to represent the United States in Saint Petersburg, 14-year-old J. Q. Adams accompanied him as his secretary. Since Dana spoke no French—the language of Russia’s elites—J. Q. effectively transacted the embassy’s business for two years. In 1784, when John Adams became America’s representative to King George III, 17-year-old John Quincy functioned as his father’s deputy. That was before entering Harvard, and then studying law. In 1794, George Washington appointed John Quincy Adams minister to the Netherlands. Successive presidents then sent him to represent the United States in Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain. In the course of these duties, he also became fluent in German, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. Since earliest youth, he had read the Latin and Greek classics.
As secretary of state (1817–1825), J. Q. Adams summed up and personified what America’s unique people would have to do to live peacefully among diverse nations. As we will see, although Adams did not invent any principles of statecraft, neither adding to nor subtracting from what Washington, Hamilton, and his father had prescribed, his dispatches, diary, and memoirs specified and applied their principles in a way that constitutes a comprehensive course of instruction for international relations in general, and for American statecraft in particular.
Adams shared, specified, and conveyed to his successors the founding generation’s fundamental interest in preserving and enhancing America’s own character. He sought occasions for reminding other nations—but especially our own—of the principles that make America what it is. Doing this encourages us to carefully consider how any decision we make in international affairs affects what is most important to ourselves as well as to others.
Adams is the font of American geopolitical thought. The reader should pay particular attention to Adams’ primordial distinction between America’s own interests—hence the “causes” for which Americans might fight—as well as to the (largely geographic) bases for evaluating the extent to which any cause or interest may be our own. The peoples on our borders and on the islands around us concern us most, followed by the oceans, then the rest of the world. Diplomatic experience had also taught Adams that, where the interests of nations coincide, negotiated agreements are scarcely necessary, and that when interests do not coincide, agreements are not worth the paper they are written on. That is why Adams practiced and taught a meticulous sort of diplomacy that aims at the mutual clarification of objectives.
John Quincy Adams considered the treaty that extended the United States’ border to the Pacific Ocean to have been his great achievement, alongside having established good relations with the governments of Britain, Russia, and so forth, in full acknowledgment of the radical differences between their regimes and ours. Adams had not invented the principle of mutual non-interference. That principle is, after all, the essence of the 1648 treaties of Westphalia. But Adams’ formulation of the Monroe Doctrine established non-interference as American foreign policy’s operational core.
The Legacy
Perhaps nothing shows how thoroughly Adams’ ways had conquered American statesmen’s minds as does his successor Andrew Jackson’s conduct. Jackson had beaten Adams in a bitter election. No two Americans could have been more different. Nevertheless, like Adams, Jackson combined commitment to peace and harmony with near-reflexive retaliation to physical attacks on Americans and on America’s honor. Like Adams, Jackson was about enhancing America. But despite being a man of the sword, his attempts to gain additional territory from Mexico were limited to offers of purchase, just as Adams’ had been. And though President Jackson owned slaves, his refusal to admit Texas as a slave state and his forceful stand against South Carolina’s attempt to nullify federal law were as forceful as Adams’ would have been. America’s greatness had been Adams’ great objective—a greatness that could not be purchased by unjust war or by any sacrifice of its principles.
In short, John Quincy Adams had codified the founding generation’s principles in foreign affairs into a set of practices by statesmen and expectations on the part of the public. That is why even the far-lesser statesmen in the years preceding the Civil War adhered to the Adams paradigm, if—as in the case of the Mexican War (1846–48)—only ineptly and hypocritically. To wit: President Polk did not intend to start the Mexican War; he resisted pressures to take over Mexico for nation-building, and paid Mexico the price he would have paid to purchase what he conquered. Meanwhile, presidents between Jackson and Lincoln delivered peaceful adjustment of interests with the rest of mankind.
Abraham Lincoln’s first major speech expressed his quintessentially American approach to international affairs: “All the armies in the world led by a Bonaparte, disposing of the earth’s treasure, our own excepted, could not take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.” Only Americans, he said, can truly hurt America. And they can do that only by putting their own passions and interests against America itself. That is why, as discord led to secession, Lincoln adjured the South not to start the war. Both Northerners and Southerners, he said, must think of themselves as Americans, first.
Because Lincoln kept in mind Washington’s commitment to treating fellow Americans as citizens, he aimed his conduct of the Civil War at reconciliation from start to finish. All manner of war aroused Lincoln’s deepest fears. “Peace among ourselves and with all nations” was the star by which he steered."
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Skipping now to the closing paragraphs, we see the kind of political arguments which caused the FBI to stalk and bait the Professor at his lectures. Codevilla then contracted serious COVID, and when he started recovering, was run down on the street by a "drunk" driver.
"The third time is enemy action," said Goldfinger...
"The War on Terror, against no one in particular and with no concrete objective, became a vehicle by which persons in power advanced personal, corporate, and partisan interests. Advantage over domestic competitors was high among these. Quickly, they applied the label “terrorist” to their domestic competitors, and increasingly turned that war’s extraordinary powers against other Americans. No more thorough negation of the Washington/Adams approach to war can be imagined.Simple to conceive, the principles by which early Americans earned respect have always been hard to practice. “Shut up about other people’s business!” has always been the bedrock principle of international communication. John Jay did not make it so in Federalist 3; nor did George Washington in his farewell address; nor John Quincy Adams’ instructions with regard to South America’s and Greece’s struggles for independence; nor Theodore Roosevelt’s rebukes to imperialists. For these statesmen, minding their own business was second nature.
In short, the American people, having experienced foreign policy as an endless drain of blood, treasure, and honor detached from and even opposed to the common good, have withdrawn support, even respect, for their government’s role among nations.America’s Real Circumstances
The American people and international circumstances of today could hardly have been imagined only a few decades ago. They have come about in no small part due to how America’s progressive ruling class has thought and ruled. Surely, the pitiful results should prevent this ruling class from continuing as it has. The end of the long Cold War emergency should have led them to reset foreign policy onto solid, timeless grounds. Instead, freed from the last vestiges of responsibility, they gave free rein to their progressive tendencies which, over the past 30 years, have neutered the United States of America among nations.
During the past three decades, the international environment has become ever more hostile to America. In Russia, communism’s collapse had been followed by a wave of pro-Western, pro-American sentiment. But U.S. statesmen’s impotent preaching combined with incompetent involvement with the former Communist Party bosses that were privatizing the country into their own pockets quickly made Russians anti-American for the first time in history.
In 1990, China had loomed small. Its economy was worth $367 billion while America’s was about $6 trillion. Neither was China a military threat. By 2020, China was a major power. In sum, most of the security Americans had earned in the Pacific War of 1941-1945 was gone.
By 2020, Europe had long since ceased to be America’s ally. Anti-Americanism had been growing among Europe’s ruling classes since the 1960s. Yes, relations between its ruling classes and America’s continued to be close. But, increasingly, as the ruling classes on both sides of the Atlantic were beset by challenges from their own people—as neither set of elites could nor would marshal popular support for their transatlantic partners—they related to each other on ever-narrower bases.
In the new century, as America’s progressive statesmen lost war after endless war, as the reservoir of respect for America dried up ...In short, the U.S. ruling classes ceased to respect the American people who, in turn, have ceased to respect their rulers. More fundamentally, both rulers and ruled have become very different from the Americans who bestrode the globe in the mid-20th century. They also drew on the reservoir of respect that Americans had built up among nations. These reservoirs have never been lower. It remains to be seen whether any foreign policy for today’s America is possible. No task is more important, or more difficult to accomplish, than recovering respect.
These leaders recalled Americans to that principle precisely because many in their time were paying insufficient attention to it while others violated it to showcase their pretenses to virtue. In our time—progressives having made loose talk a virtue—the beginning of international seriousness must consist of restricting official comments strictly to America’s own business, speaking unadorned truth insofar as it concerns ourselves, saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Alas, only serious people can do that.
John Quincy Adams did not install peace as international relations’ primary goal or discover that mutual noninterference is the foundation of peace. That primacy and that principle happen to be the foundation of the modern (post-1648) international system. J. Q. Adams’ formulation of the Monroe Doctrine simply made that principle into a system of priorities adapted to the United States of America’s peculiar regime and geographic circumstances. Since these peculiarities have not changed, the order of those priorities remains intact: America First, then everything else in decreasing order of its influence on America.
But just as 200 years ago even statesmen of Thomas Jefferson’s and James Monroe’s caliber were attracted to the mirage of greatness through alliances, so today lesser men find it difficult to grasp John Quincy Adams’ teaching that alignment of interests among nations can only be creatures of time and circumstance. This means that although alliances are often keys to events, any people may pursue with any level of confidence only such objectives as they can achieve unilaterally.
The men who made America great, the men on Mount Rushmore, would counsel us strongly to decide unilaterally on our international affairs, and to do so by deliberation through our elected representatives—by their votes and by ours. The importance of doing so, they would tell us, transcends the matters at hand because it reaffirms and reminds us of the most basic of all political facts: our independence—meaning our collective liberty and responsibility for being what we were and should be again: different from other peoples, fortunate for that difference, grateful for it, and committed to maintaining it.
Never has it been so important to remember and reaffirm that our autonomy depends on our unity as Americans.".......................................................
A very long and very excellent essay by the late patriot Prof. Codevilla (code-vill-ah). Read it all.
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in an 1819 letter to Herr von Fiirstenwarther of Germany, who was seeking government favors for coming here:
Don't be fooled.
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The Unblinken |
Related:
"The US military ran the entire operation to sink the Moskva, including running the tracking of the ship via a P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft, which then handed off fire solutions to the Ukrainians who were all trained by the US military as well. Thus, the United States provided the weapons, the training, the tracking and the fire solution to sink the Moskva. All Ukraine did was press the “fire” button, essentially. This is so widely known know that it’s even being reported by the UK Daily Mail. It reports:
REVEALED: US maritime surveillance plane was over Black Sea minutes before Russian flagship Moskva was ‘hit by Ukrainian missiles’
A P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft was patrolling the coast before the attackThe high-tech jet can spot ships on radar at ranges of more than 100 miles… The US Navy used its new marine surveillance aircraft to provide accurate targeting data to Ukrainian forces to sink the Russian Black Sea flag ship Moskva on April 13.""
"Additionally, Russia’s defense ministry said on Saturday that its forces had shot down a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet and destroyed three MI-8 helicopters at an airfield in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region."
Specialist Bishop E. Evans never should have been put in the position of rescuing The Big Guy's fentanyl mules and human cargo. The river didn't kill him. The $wamp did.
Well, they did it to us.
Just following orders from Beijing.
If it happened, we wouldn't know which government attacked us. Although the American Gumment has already attacked us twice with a Virus/Vaxx tag-team.
Biden is China’s Colonial Governor, their Proconsul of America and a Wholly-Owned Appendage of Chairman Xi’s scrotum.
And his entire China Cabinet, too.
BIDEN: “We’re going to start the process for every vehicle in the United States military, every vehicle is going to be climate-friendly.”
TRANSLATION: “We’re going to start the process for every vehicle in the United States military, every vehicle is going to have Chinese batteries and computer systems that can be disabled from Shenzhen–just like a CheatWare Voting Machine!”
Debit Cards For Illegals - How You Pay To Bring Illegal Migrants To The United States (substack.com)
They're charging us for our own Ethnic Cleansing.
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"Your Swamp does not amuse us." |
“Emigrants…coming here, are not to expect favors from the governments. …They come to a life of independence, but [also] to a life of labor—and, if they cannot accommodate themselves to the character--moral, political, and physical, of this country, with all its compensating balances of good and evil, the Atlantic is always open to them, to return to the land of their nativity and their fathers.”
He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from atop the barn of his parents, John and Abigail Adams. At 10, he was in the courts of Europe with father John. At 14, he was already a Revolutionary diplomat. Ambassador to Russia, Prussia, the Netherlands, England. Lawyer. Harvard professor. Spoke many languages including Latin. State senator then US senator. The only Federalist to support the Louisiana Purchase. Supported Clay's American System of commerce. Secured Florida after his future nemesis Andy Jackson's victories there, wrote several peace treaties including the War of 1812, and as Secretary of State, he authored the Monroe Doctrine. Won the presidency, then 9 terms as a House member, breaking the House's Gag Rule on abolitionism, winning freedom for the ship Amistad's slaves in the Supreme Court, he established the Smithsonian and raised Diplomat Charles Frances Adams. And, yes, he had a pet alligator.
You see, America once had a Ruling Class that was worth a damn. No more.
You see, America once had a Ruling Class that was worth a damn. No more.
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| Oration - July 4th- 1837 - WallBuilders |
"Why is it, Friends and Fellow Citizens, that you are here assembled? Why is it, that, entering upon the sixty-second year of our national existence, you have honored with an invitation to address you from this place, a fellow citizen of a former age, bearing in the records of his memory, the warm and vivid affections which attached him, at the distance of a full half century, to your town, and to your forefathers, then the cherished associates of his youthful days? Why is it that, next to the birth day of the Savior of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day?—And why is it that, among the swarming myriads of our population, thousands and tens of thousands among us, abstaining, under the dictate of religious principle, from the commemoration of that birth-day of Him, who brought life and immortality to light, yet unite with all their brethren of this community, year after year, in celebrating this the birthday of the nation?
Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon the earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity, and gave to the world the first irrevocable pledge of the fulfilment of the prophecies, announced directly from Heaven at the birth of the Savior and predicted by the greatest of the Hebrew prophets six hundred years before?Cast your eyes backwards upon the progress of time, sixty-one years from this day; and in the midst of the horrors and desolations of civil war, you behold an assembly of Planters, Shopkeepers and Lawyers, the Representatives of the People of thirteen English Colonies in North America, sitting in the City of Philadelphia. These fifty-five men on that day, unanimously adopt and publish to the world, a state paper under the simple title of ’A Declaration’.The object of this Declaration was two-fold.First, to proclaim the People of the thirteen United Colonies, one People, and in their name, and by their authority, to dissolve the political bands which had connected them with another People, that is, the People of Great Britain.Secondly, to assume, in the name of this one People, of the thirteen United Colonies, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station, to which the Laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God, entitled them.
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Mincing Quincys-UPDATE: Soros and Koch have spawned, creating a new org called the Quincy Institute, dedicated to destroying everything John Quincy Adams worked his whole life to build. He was an American patriot, not a Tower-of-Babel Globalist. In a town where the Anti-Trust think-tanks are funded by Google, it's not surprising that a Nazi art-dealer and his best customer would collude to steal John Quincy's good name. If they happen to quote JQA saying "[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy", it is only to protect the Ayatollah or their profits, not you.
Don't be fooled.
"AND NOW, FRIENDS AND COUNTRYMEN, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?
Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.
She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.
She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....
Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice."--John Quincy Adams, 1821
Despite John Quincy Adams' best efforts, we live in a dictatorship. This IS an American Dictatorship, even if they still feel the need to try and hide it.
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Author archive: Angelo Codevilla › American Greatness (amgreatness.com) Angelo Privilege by Julie Ponzi "My last long conversation with Angelo was just before the recent 9/11 anniversary, when we discussed his plans for future articles and what was happening in the world. He insisted that what was necessary at this crucial moment in American politics was leadership. He seemed confident that our crisis also announces opportunities. The greatest challenges offer the greatest possibilities to display human excellence, and thus will invite a statesman of real ambition and ability to emerge and remind Americans of what makes us unique among the peoples of the Earth: our instinct (if not always our understanding) that we are and ought to be the sovereigns of our own destiny. Our ruling-class oligarchs have supplanted that sovereignty through an administrative state that does their bidding while claiming to adorn itself in the forms and trappings of constitutionality. Yet their open contempt for our actual Constitution and its purposes proves only how difficult self-government is to achieve and maintain. Freedom under the law is not the usual way of things in this world. It is our privilege to fight to reestablish and maintain it."....... |
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