Enduring the Siege
July 4, 2022
“Americans are getting stronger. Twenty years ago, it took two people to carry ten dollars’ worth of groceries. Today, a five-year-old can do it.”
– Henny Youngman
The chickens are coming home to roost. But when they arrive, they’re bringing fewer eggs.
Independence Day is here, but the shackles seem to be tightening. For two years we’ve endured a series of outrages far worse than the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence.
After oppressive lockdowns, mandatory masks, forced separation, restricted travel, financial confiscation, compulsory drug injections, uncontrolled currency counterfeiting, orchestrated food shortages, deliberate energy deprivation, reckless war provocation, and anti-scientific propaganda imploring us to sacrifice civilization to toy with the temperature, it’s natural to mourn lost liberty while we fight for the morsels we’re permitted to keep.
The Fourth of July has always and obviously been a quintessential American holiday. Americans cherish the ideas and love the words, even tho’ most of them stopped taking them seriously long ago (as we lamented a couple years ago).
Yet in recent years, this holiday joined Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Columbus Day in being placed atop the perpetually apoplectic altar of the “woke” priesthood. It’s not yet been sacrificed. But the fire is burning, and the knives are out.
There have been other times when the Fourth was honored with reluctant indifference or mild contempt. But the earlier equivocacy was for politically legitimate grudges rather than for politically correct gripes.
For more than a century, July 4 was greeted with ambivalence…if not animosity…by the conquered states of the Confederate South. To their ancestors, like those of New England who’d threatened secession on several occasions, Independence Day commemorated a necessary separation to preserve state sovereignty.
But when the Southern states decided to depart in peace as their colonial predecessors previously did, the Union regime refused to let them go. Instead, like the British Monarchy four score and five years earlier, Lincoln’s government unleashed its armies.
Seven states had seceded when guns fired on Fort Sumter. After the smoke cleared, four more would go, with as many more restrained only by Lincoln’s martial law. The US army would attack the states that had declared independence, precipitating an American Iliad that would consume unprecedented property and almost a million lives.
For two years, the invaded states resisted the flood. After Chancellorsville in May 1863, the current of the war began to flow their way. But during the first week of July, the tide turned.
Robert E Lee…who’d freed his slaves early that year…brought the Army of Northern Virginia into the hills of southern Pennsylvania. During the first three days of July, Union forces repelled Lee’s attacks. On their last day at Gettysburg, Southern forces finally succumbed during the futile assault of Pickett’s Charge. Beaten and repulsed, Lee’s army retreated to Virginia.
Meanwhile, far to the south, Ulysses S Grant…who with his wife still owned some slaves…had besieged a strategic town on the banks of the Mississippi. West of the Appalachians, that river was the crucial corridor of the Confederate economy.
Food, supplies, and merchandise plied the Mississippi to and from New Orleans, where they were carried by ships to distant markets. But if New Orleans was the Southern gateway to the wider world, then Vicksburg was the key.
By May of 1863, it was the last Confederate stronghold along the Mississippi. Positioned along the east bank on a high bluff, Vicksburg allowed small artillery to control the river and protect or preclude essential supplies.
For this reason, Grant wanted the town. Yankee capture would complete the Union’s “Anaconda Plan” to strangle the South. Were Vicksburg to fall, the Confederacy would be cut in half, and lose the vital flow from its commercial aorta.
But the high fortress prevented capture from across the river. Grant considered crossings further south, but to no avail. Sherman had pressed Pemberton’s Confederate forces from the north. When Pemberton established defensive lines around the town, Sherman tried attacking from the east. The Confederates held.
To subjugate Vicksburg, Grant and Sherman settled upon a siege. If they couldn’t take the town, they would starve its inhabitants and blockade their supplies. This tactic was consistent with the diabolical nature of their targeted assaults on innocent civilians, the barbarity of which would steadily increase over the following couple years.
The sinister siege lasted six weeks. The Union Army continually bombed the city. Residents sheltered in caves to avoid the shelling. Among the few buildings not destroyed was an Episcopal Church, to which starving citizens snuck for solace and prayer.
After forty days…and on the day after Lee lost at Gettysburg…they’d had enough. The citizens and army were starved for food and short of supplies. After a valiant defense, the town of Vicksburg finally gave in. It was July 4, a previously propitious date that would thereafter live in infamy across the conquered Confederacy.
Vicksburg fell to Grant, and awaited the ravages of the ravenous Yankees. When they arrived, they killed some civilians, and looted many homes that survived the shells. Many of the marauders were court martialed, but the damage was done.
The war continued almost two more years, with the US government inflicting wanton destruction across vast swaths of the civilian South. Women were raped, homes destroyed, animals slaughtered, and fields desolated. The carnage was incomprehensible, as the Union army anticipated and inspired the abominable tactics of Twentieth Century war.
More than a century and a half after Lincoln’s troops suffocated Vicksburg, the US government once again has us under siege.
In recent years, to disguise its inflation, appease its benefactors, and control the plebs, the power elite has been knee-capping food supplies and crippling reliable energy, while providing a crutch of subsidies to primitive power, and to empty calories derived from industrial sludge.
Absurd restrictions on fossil fuel extraction…coupled with an influx of funny money and the inevitable aftershocks of a demented pandemic response…are raising prices and diminishing supplies of real food and reliable power necessary to sustain society. This is a slow-motion siege, a gradual blockade meant to induce compliance and assert control.
Will Rogers reminded us that there are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. And the rest who have to pee on an electric fence to learn for themselves. These days, most of the world is non-chalantly pulling down its zipper.
At this point, the higher prices are apparent. But at least the essentials remain (mostly) available. If this lunacy continues, they won’t for long. Fuel and food don’t pop from the ground at the flip of a switch.
To get to us, they require time, capital, manpower, transport, and contractual protection provided by the rule-of-law. Government policy has systematically distorted or debilitated each of these essential components of a sustainable civilization.
In most places, supermarket aisles remain full. But grocery stores are a lagging indicator, and a poor harbinger of impending shortages. This year’s crop fills next year’s shelves. Feed and fertilizer supplies are shrinking as prices skyrocket. Feed rates have tripled, fuel has doubled, and fertilizer is getting harder and harder to find.
As small businesses were consciously crushed during covid, family farms are being wittingly squeezed now. It is costing them more to feed their livestock than to sell them. Many will be more inclined to cull the herd for their own use than to sell it for ours.
As under covid when Amazon and Walmart enjoyed added business from crippled competitors, so now Big Ag and industrial lots will consolidate share as small planters and ranchers are uprooted from their land or shuttled to the chute.
Meanwhile, as gas prices continue to elevate, diesel pumps are beginning to run dry. If they do, the trucks stop rolling. And when that happens, shelves will be bare regardless how much food comes from the farm.
These things aren’t “happening” to us. They’re being done to us. We aren’t enduring unavoidable acts of nature or inexorable forces of God. We’re suffering decisions of politicians and policies of State, with deliberate intent to achieve egregious goals. This is a modern Anaconda Plan on a global scale.
The State resents resistance. As under their Covid Regime, if we don’t take their “expert” advice, they’ll coerce us with dictatorial decrees. When the virus emerged, governments didn’t merely allow people the age-old option to assess their own personal situation, and to stay home, keep their distance, or take medicine (or not) as they saw fit.
Governments made separation mandatory, by closing small businesses…while allowing their larger benefactors to remain open. And to enter those, people were required to show compliance by affixing filthy fabrics across their face. Schools were shuttered and churches closed.
When “vaccines” became available, people were given a choice whether to inject the experimental elixirs, while being assured they would prevent infection. It was only when injected people began to fall ill that pharmaceutical consumption became compulsory for everyone. Employment, travel, and even medical care became contingent on receiving the suspect shots.
This medical tyranny compounded labor and supply disruptions that prior lockdowns inflicted on the structure of production. Supplies of parts, material, transport, and labor were all crippled by the malicious effects of these pernicious policies.
When we allow decisions to be taken from individuals, the decisions don’t go away. They simply go to a new decider. And when we allow them to go to governments, we may as well hop in a waiting Continental, and prepare to ride past the grassy knoll with the top down.
A politician, as the saying has it, is someone who will lay down your life for the good of his country. These days, our illustrious rulers no longer pretend even to that superficially virtuous rationale. Our politicians leave no doubt that they are sacrificing our lives for the good of themselves, all while telling us it’s our fault for wanting to be free.
It’s incredible that so many people have gotten away with pretending freedom is an offensive, unacceptable desire in what ostensibly is supposed to be a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world.
Today is Independence Day. We should remember what that means, and what’s been lost. And do everything we can to get it back.
Let the fireworks begin.
JD
