A Marine Who Fought on Guadalcanal Decries Our Loss of Freedom

I haven't posted this fact in a long time, but I remember when the only time the Federal Government crossed peoples minds was when the mail came, and when we voted. Washington D.C. was far away in both distance and effect. And we were surprisingly free. Boys carried pocket knives to school every day, and nobody cared. Highschool kids carried rifles to school to go hunting after school. Nobody cared. Free speech was taken for granted, free religious expression was taken for granted. Men, who had fought real tyranny were unafraid of petit tyrants at home.  But as the 1960s rolled on, things began to change for the worse. They didn't start in the 1960s, of course, that is just when they began to manifest in public life. But the totalitarians had been working in the background for 100 years by then, maybe even longer.

All of these thoughts came flooding back to me as I read today at the American Thinker an article by J. B. Shurk entitled Ctrl-Alt-Delete The Totalitarian State. Shurk's thesis is that we are in an epic struggle, whether we want to be or not, for freedom. Either the tyrants will win or the people (termed "Westerners" in Shurks piece) will fight back.

There are three government narratives pushed today that are not real: (1) fraud-free elections, (2) a looming climate apocalypse, and (3) a COVID health emergency requiring total government control. If you see through only one, then you're not looking hard enough. Or as Bill Engvall might say, "If you now believe COVID is mostly a hoax but are still terrified of global warming, here's your sign." Conversely, if you do see through them, you're likely being censored for expressing those points of view.

Here's our impasse: when governments claim to have a monopoly on truth, then citizens are expected to accept preposterous fantasies, no matter how much opposing evidence they might see. The narrative is absolute. Dissent is forbidden. Total obedience is the objective. Last century, free Westerners understood these features as telltale signs of totalitarianism. Today, much less free Westerners have been taught to embrace — without scrutiny or wisdom — the government's fairy tales as part of our required, if not sacred, deference to the bureaucratic State's cult of expertise. Whether citizens grasp this shift in individual freedom or not, the general rule handed down from governments is stark yet succinct: ask us no questions, and we will tell you no lies!

Westerners desperately need to reboot their systems of government before those systems of government delete the public's power to make changes ever again. It is not possible for political leaders to claim that their countries support personal freedom when they snatch that freedom away at the first sneeze, cow fart, or unapproved tweet. It is not logical for governments to claim that they protect "democracy" when armies of unelected permanent bureaucrats run the modern State. It is not reasonable for Western nations to claim that they cherish "free thinking" and "free expression" when their technocratic surveillance arms actively censor speech and promote State-approved points of view over all others.

Ok, so I am an old fart and you young whippershappers don't have to listen to me. What do I know, right? But maybe you will pay attention to an even older person, someone who actually fought on Gaudalcanal in WWII:

Earlier this year, a U.S. Marine who fought at the bloody Battle of Guadalcanal during WWII was being interviewed in celebration of his hundredth birthday. Veteran Carl Dekle, who went through absolute hell in the Pacific theater and managed to persevere against exhaustion and relentless close combat, broke down in tears. However, the Silver Star recipient was not reliving nightmares from the past; he was heartbroken at the state of America today.

"Nowadays I am so upset that the things we did and the things we fought for and the boys that died for it, it's all going down the drain," he said. "Our country's going to hell in a handbasket. We haven't got the country we had when I was raised, not at all. Nobody will have the fun I had; nobody will have the opportunity I had. It's just not the same."

Imagine fighting Japanese Imperialism and the threats of global totalitarianism, surviving when so many friends did not, and living long enough to see the very ideological threats that you once defeated on foreign battlefields find a malevolent foothold on the same land of liberty you defended with selfless love. This is a brave warrior who battled through terror today's generations cannot imagine, and he is reduced to unbearable sadness because "our country's gone to hell."

All is vanity, says the preacher in Ecclesiasties 1. So it is, but while one of us is alive to remember, we will continue to exhort our fellow citizens that you are being fed lies. And you can change things. Oh, not that you won't continue to be fed lies, but you don't have to believe the lies. Furthermore, you can act to blunt the effect of these lies, but only if you act.