On Violence and Unity – the Unending Quest

The historical truth is that peace and unity have always been in short supply everywhere in every age.

In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the terrorist ambush at a Dallas ICE facility, the air is thick with pondering, questions, and speeches about how our society must “turn down” the heat, corral the wild rhetoric, and eliminate the legal ambiguity of “hate speech” if we’re going to end the violence, explain the very people responsible for the speech. They’re the same 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.)

Of course, none of these are really the questions.

After all, what normal person going about their life doesn’t want social tranquility and peace? They’re actually the questions politicians, pseudo-intellectuals, and wannabe commentators sling around like mashed potatoes in a crowd – they leave everyone angry and splattered with a mess.  

The first question concerns the definition of words, so that we share a mutual understanding of precisely what we’re saying. As an example, the modern radical socialist Democrats have made it very clear officially since 2008 that unity, as they use the word, is achieved when the US replaces individual rights with group rights, replaces Constitutional protections with positive rights of entitlement, creates a command economy replacing a free market economy, and disestablishes faith and family from societal priorities – the “it takes a village” mantra.

The other question is really about how we live together in community, even if we don’t individually 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.

“E pluribus unum”- out of many, one –, 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 and Europe, diverse with people of English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish descent, enslaved African’s introduced by the British, and a population of free African Americans.

It was human freedom, a vast, open continent, and the promise of the Revolution that drew diverse peoples – and the ideals that offered unity. Yet, the unfinished business and 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, which always called the nation forward.

At Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, with the war’s end still seventeen months away, Lincoln, in his most famous speech, 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 proclaimed, would the nation find actual unity. 

As terrible as that Civil War was, it fits the pattern of history like a glove. 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, with the notable exceptions of Costa Rica and Switzerland. In contrast, China has experienced at least 40 civil wars throughout its history! (They evidently hate each other as much as they hate the West.)

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 groups infiltrating American education, religion, and government, which has dramatically altered the political landscape.

The violence started in earnest with the communist-led violent anti-war riots and attempted Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. 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 radical left and their shills in the corporate media routinely suggest “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 juxtaposed events only remind us of the precariousness of our times.

In the largest sense, the Western World, including the US, is engaged in a clash of civilizational aspirations that is irreconcilable short of God’s intervention. We are in a full-out battle with those who serve Darkness and Death, delighting in misery and subjugation of their fellow man.  

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.  

The modern radical left wants what totalitarianism always wants: total control and 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 unending quest we dare not lose.