WEBVTT

NOTE Did the South Have to Fight?

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I've got two glasses because I'm accused of being a two-fisted drinker.

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I'm going to skip all the usual banter because our distinguished chairman,

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Llewellyn Rockwell, has limited us all to 30 minutes, although I noticed Lew took 35.

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In September of 1876, a band of eight men rode into Northfield, Minnesota and proceeded

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to rob the First National Bank. From the first, everything seemed to go wrong. A teller escaped

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from the bank to warn the town, and in shooting him, the robbers only alarmed more of the

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townspeople. The men posted as guards outside the bank were attempting to clear the streets,

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But this was Minnesota, after all, and Nicholas Gustafson did not understand plain English,

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and he was shocked for refusing to get out of the way.

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Since the robbers were from Missouri, they probably did not regard the killing of a squarehead

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as murder, but with every such incident, the robbers lost time and alarmed the citizenry.

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When the shooting was ended, two of the bank robbers, Clell Miller and William Stiles,

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In the manhunt that followed, the trackers killed Samuel Wells, alias Charlie Pitts,

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and captured three others, Cole, Bob, and Jim Younger.

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As these brothers were being transported to Stillwater State Prison, a reporter asked

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Cole Younger why he had come all this way, just to rob a bank.

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We are rough men, replied the veteran of Quantrill's Raiders and used to violent ways.

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Near the end of his life, Cole explained that life had become too difficult for the youngers

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back in Missouri, and they had decided to pull one last job to get a stake.

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They picked Northfield because they had heard that the bank held the assets of General Benjamin

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and Butler, an infamous reconstruction politician also known as Spoons Butler from his propensity

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to relieve southerners of their silverware during the war.

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Two gang members who got away, Frank and Jesse James, are said to have planned the Northfield

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and Raid as a means of carrying the war back into the North.

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Whatever the truth of this legend, it indicates the sentiment of many Missourians eleven years

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after the end of the war between the states.

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But that war, which for the rest of the country, or rather countries, which began in Charleston

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Harbor in 1861, had erupted on the Kansas-Missouri border as early as 1855.

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If the war in general may be accurately described as the first modern war because of the use

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of advanced weaponry, trench war tactics, and ideological propaganda, the war in Missouri

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was more like the feuding and raiding described in the Scottish border ballads and in ancient

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Greek epic.

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Historians have had a hard time coming to grips with the rough men who rode with Quantrill

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and Bill Anderson in Defense of Southern Liberties in Missouri.

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Typically, they are described as savage outlaws who took the banditry at the first opportunity.

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At the time, however, there were Missouri newspaper men like John Newman Edwards, who

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had written with Joe Shelby, and Edwards described the men who robbed the Kansas City Fair in

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1872 as, quote, three bandits come to us from the storied Odenwald with the halo of medieval

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As much as I hate to admit it, there were no halos on Frank and Jesse James, but to

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understand their character and behavior during the long war against the Yankees, a war that

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only ended with Frank's acquittal in 1884, requires an historical imagination that is

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not fettered by Victorian prejudices of the 1870s or by the postmodern sentimentality

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of the 1990s. The proper historical and cultural context for the James and Youngers is not

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the Kansas-Missouri border in the 19th century America, so much as it is the Scottish-English

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border in the age of the ballads. Fight on, fight on, my merry men all, cries the outlaw

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Johnny Armstrong with his dying breath. And this spirit was, if anything, more ferocious

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in the more purely Celtic areas of Scotland and Ireland. The clansman's loyalty was

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to his people, rather than to someone so distant as a king, much less something so impersonal

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as a state. In 1575, sorely boy MacDonald watched as Elizabeth's commander, the Earl

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of Essex, slaughter the MacDonald women and children, 600 of them, who had been left on

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on Rathlin Island. Writing to his bloody mistress, Essex gloated over the tragedy.

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Sorely, he said, was likely to run mad for sorrow, tearing and tormenting himself and

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saying that he then lost all he ever had.

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But this spirit of rough heroism and loyalty to clan and family, especially to the women

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of the Clan is not at all limited to the Scots. At the very beginning of our civilization,

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we meet a race of warriors who might well have joined the Missourians on their ill-fated

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expedition to Minnesota. The cliché that the Greeks had a word for it actually works

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in the case of the exaltation that animates the heroic warrior. Homer in the Iliad uses

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He uses the word karmē, a word that from its derivation ought to mean something like happiness or well-being.

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He uses it to mean the joy of battle.

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From the very beginning, ancient Greek attitudes to war were ambiguous.

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They knew the horrors of war all too well.

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The losers faced the looting and destruction of their entire world.

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And while a man might die in battle, a harder lock was imposed on his wife and children who were taken as slaves.

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Plays. A large part of the most familiar Greek literature are plays written in Athens during

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the fifth century, a period of unremitting warfare as the Athenians attempted to extend

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their empire. And the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes are filled with

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denunciations of war, which, in Sophocles' words, takes the best and spares the cowards.

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They knew even then that war is disgenic.

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No one has done a better job than Euripides of portraying the horrors and immorality of

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imperial conquest.

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Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, had been supremely happy in her husband and children.

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But as she says in the Trojan women, I saw my sons fall beneath the Greek spear, and

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I cut my hair at their tombs.

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Father Priam, I did not mourn him after hearing the rumor of his death, but with my own eyes

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I saw him butchered and saw my city captured. The virgin daughters I had brought up for

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princely marriages I nursed for the aliens who tore them from my arms. But if the price

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of defeat is so terrible, then it must be glorious to stand up and fight for family

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and friends. In the very same play, Hecuba's daughter Cassandra tells the Greek messenger

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that the subjugated Trojans are better off than the conquering Greeks, who, when they

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came to the banks of the Scamander, died not defending their frontiers nor their high-towered

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homeland, whom Ares killed, they did not see their children, and they were not laid out

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for burial by their own wives. They lie in alien earth. The Trojans, on the other hand,

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she said, died first of all for their native land, the best thing that can be said of anyone.

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Herodotus tells the story of Solon, the Athenian, who visited the court of King Croesus of Lydia.

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When the wealthy king asks Solon who is the happiest man on earth, the Athenian tells

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him Tellus of Athens, who lived at a time when his city was flourishing, he had two

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Two fine sons, and after a prosperous life, he died fighting for his country.

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Herodotus was writing in a generation after the wars with Persia, in which the Athenians

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and the Spartans showed that small numbers of free men in defending their cities could

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fend off even the greatest military power that the world had ever known.

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One veteran of the Persian wars put these words into the Greeks at Salamis as they faced

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This plain translation does not convey the sense of the original in full, but notice

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how in every clause the emphasis is on kinship. These men at Salamis are sons of the Greeks,

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Not merely Greeks, because they are links in a chain that binds them with their forefathers

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and with their own children as well as with the gods of their ancestors.

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Why is it a contest?

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Because for ancient Greeks, war was the ultimate sport, and all the lesser sports like running

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and riding, wrestling, javelin throwing, were merely training exercises in preparation

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for the real thing.

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When the Persian king set spies to find out what the Spartans at the Pass of Thermopylae

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were doing, he reported that some of them were engaged in gymnastic exercises while

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others were combing out their hair.

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The Spartans, of course, always comb their hair when they are about to face death.

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But the Persians do not find out about the gymnastic exercises until later in the war,

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when Arcadian deserters tell the Persian general that the Greeks, who are threatened with total

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World War and Devastation are celebrating the Olympic Games, in which the only prize

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is a wreath of wild olive.

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Good God exclaims one of the Persian noblemen, what kind of men have you brought us to fight

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against, men who contend with each other not for money, but for honor?

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Like all great sportsmen, Greek fighters took pride in their gear.

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The lesbian troublemaker, Alcaeus, who is, by the way, not a member of the Clinton cabinet,

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simply a poet, and, uh, Alcaeus takes aesthetic delight in depicting weapons of mass destruction.

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The great hall, he said, is gleaming in bronze, and the rafters are decked out with shining

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helmets.

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Their horsehair plumes are nodding down.

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As greaves cover the pegs they are hanging from, fresh linen corsets and hollow shields

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are strewn about the floor, and alongside them are swords from chalices and many belts

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and tunics.

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The scene and the whole mood of Alcaeus' poem resembles a locker room before a championship

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game.

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The Spartan poet, Tirtius, in urging his fellow citizens to fight, might well be describing

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Let the soldier set his feet apart and dig both heels into the ground, biting his lip

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with his teeth.

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Let him fight against the men opposing him, with foot against foot, shield braced against

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shield, helmet against helmet.

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The fighter he is describing here is the heavily armored infantryman known as the hoplite.

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In earlier ages, what had counted most in Greek warfare were individual noble warriors,

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and the introduction of hoplite warfare represents more than a mere military revolution because it meant that the middling classes, men who could afford their own weapons were now the essential core of the city's defense and of the city's social and political structure.

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The Greek ambivalence toward war is symbolized by two gods of war, Ares, who stands for the reckless carnage and brutality, and Athena, the defender of cities.

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Ares is portrayed in the Iliad as a bloodthirsty but ultimately unreliable warrior, capable of shifting sides,

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while Athena is steadfast, inspiring her champions with the courage to defend their comrades, their families, and their cities.

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Homer's Prince of Troy, Hector, shows both sides of war.

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When the fighting spirit is on him, Hector, like the other heroes, can be like a might terrible force of nature.

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But in his reflective moments he knows that he will die in an ultimately futile struggle to save his city.

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But his code of honor does not allow him to quit.

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I dread the rebuke of the Trojans, if like a coward I should shirk from war.

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Nor does my heart bid me to do so, since I know how to be brave and always to fight in the front ranks, gaining glory for my father and for myself.

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Southerners were to learn the horrors of war and the miseries of subjection almost as well

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as Homer's Trojans or the very real victims of Athenian imperialism.

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But in the early stages of the war, many southerners went lighthearted into the army and into battle.

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All across the South there were parades and patriotic ceremonies with orators promising

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a glorious but easy victory over the timorous Yankees.

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Some southern men were willing to go to war as eagerly as they would fight a duel.

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Both were, after all, affairs of honor.

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The duel still flourished in the South before and after the war, and the southern cause

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could be regarded as the duel writ large.

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As Bertram Wyatt Brown observes in his book Southern Honor, if honor had meant nothing

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to men and women, there would have been no civil war.

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Many southerners resented conscription not because they were unwilling to fight, but

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because they wanted the honor of fighting as volunteers.

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While soberheads like those of Jefferson Davis and Colonel Lee might warn against the long

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and bloody conflict, many young men were afraid the war would be over before they could even

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get into it.

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In his reminiscences, General John B. Gordon describes the rebellion that broke out when

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the governor of Georgia sent a telegram telling the raccoon ruffs to go home.

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These rugged mountaineers resolved that they would not go home, that they had a right to

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go to the war, had started for the war, and were not going to be trifled with by the governor

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or anyone else.

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Civil War diaries and letters can make melancholy reading, but they are also enlivened by accounts

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of hijinks and practical jokes which typify the southern spirit.

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Colonel Leonidas Lafayette Polk wrote his family at home, You can excuse this bad writing

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and the matter, too, when I assure you that about one hundred boys are frolicking and

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playing hot jacket all around me. This is more high spirits than Greek athleticism,

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And if you would read the accounts of the cavalry raids staged by Stewart, Mosby and

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Morgan, to say nothing of the wild exploits of Quantrill's pistol-shooting rough riders,

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you will come away with the impression that some of these men were having the time of

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their lives.

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When Southerners tried to explain their reasons for the war, they often fell back on parallels

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with the first war for American independence.

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The history of that war was not some ancient record of legendary events. It had been passed

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down from father to son. American independence was a family legacy, not an abstract set of

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rights. The father of Robert E. Lee, Light Horse Harry Lee, was the most famous cavalryman

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to serve under George Washington, and it was his son who edited his war memoirs for publication.

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Throughout Robert Lee's career, General Washington served as the model for his own character

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as well as a guide for his critical decisions.

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And Lee's letter of resignation from the U.S. Army deliberately echoes the language of Washington.

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And in making Lee commander of the Virginia forces, the president of the state convention

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closed with a quotation from the first president, one that obviously echoed the sentiments of

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of Most Confederates.

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When the father of his country made his last will and testament, he said, he gave his sword

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to his nephews with an injunction that they should never be drawn from their scabbards

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except in self-defense or in defense of the rights and liberties of their country.

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This high-minded comparison with the nation's founding was not confined to the leaders of

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the Confederacy.

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James McPherson, in a very recent book, it's so recent I don't think it's actually out, from LSU,

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found such patriotic motives in two-thirds of the soldiers whose diaries and letters he's consulted.

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An Alabama corporal captured at Gettysburg said he fought, quote,

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for the same principles which fired the hearts of our ancestors in the revolutionary struggle.

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And a Missouri lieutenant wounded at Pea Ridge wrote that if he were killed,

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Both sides in the war professed lofty motives, but there was a grand difference. The South

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was fighting on its own ground in defense of its people, while the North, however noble

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its ultimate goal, was waging a war of aggression. But first, in quotes of Texas Private in 1864,

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We are fighting for matters real and tangible, our property and our homes, they for matters abstract and intangible.

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Even some northerners agree. An Illinois officer explained to his wife, they are fighting from different motives from us.

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We are fighting for the union, a high and noble sentiment, but after all, a sentiment.

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They are fighting for independence and are animated by a passion and hatred against invaders.

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As slogans, the cause of the Union and the Holy Crusade to end slavery have a decidedly Jacobin ring that we can detect in American war propaganda ever since.

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We have fought wars to end all wars, wars to defend democracy, wars to contain communism,

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and even a war to restore the legitimate monarch to the throne of Kuwait.

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What we have not heard, however, is the ancient call at Salamis to defend our homes, our churches,

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and our graves from an invader.

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No matter how a southerner might feel about secession or slavery, the army of locusts

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that descended upon his country enlightened all but the most stubborn unionists.

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In the Shenandoah Valley, Colonel John Singleton Mosby caught up with a group of 30 Yankee

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soldiers who had been engaged in plundering and burning down the houses of loyal Virginians.

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Mosby's men killed 29 of them.

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The survivor was an oversight.

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The North was shocked. Making war upon civilians is a just and enlightened practice of civilization.

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It's only killing soldiers that is immoral.

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By the way, there's a similar outrage was expressed in all our recent campaigns. Brave

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Palestinians drive into, blow themselves up trying to get at our marines and this is called

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After the war was over, the leading abolitionists who had done so much to instigate the carnage

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headed up the humanitarian relief efforts, thus establishing the model for American humanitarian

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violence in every subsequent generation.

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First we bomb our victims, then we smother them in relief parcels, hoping to prove that

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that ours is a humane empire with only benign intentions.

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I prefer the plain dealing of the ancient Assyrians who raped, tortured and pillaged

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without hypocrisy.

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Euripides in his war plays had dwelt upon the sufferings of women, impoverished, humiliated,

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widowed and raped by an invading army.

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Modern men who look upon women either as economic competitors or impossibly desirable centerfolds

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will find it difficult to understand the chivalrous concern for women that endured until very

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recently in the South.

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In accepting a battle flag from a group of ladies, a company of Mississippi College rifles

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declared, we prize this flag, ladies, not so much for its intrinsic worth but for the

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sake of those who gave it and the bright eyes that followed the fingers as they plied the

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The same Texas private who said he was fighting for something tangible after meeting two beautiful

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women who put flowers on the barrel of his musket wrote his parents that he had finally

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solved the mystery of what they were fighting for by George were fighting for the women.

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Many Yankee officers and men who shared these chivalrous sentiments treated southern women

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with honor and respect. However, the exceptions are so common as to give the Union Army an

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evil reputation. Sherman's bummers, unleashed upon the defenseless women and children of

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Georgia and South Carolina, stole whatever they did not eat on the spot and burned whatever

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they could not carry away, reducing the women and children, of course, to starvation. If

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The women irritated the Yankees by complaining about the theft of the family silver. They

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were paid back with the sight of their home on fire.

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Perhaps the most notorious abuser of southern womanhood was General Benjamin Butler, known

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as Picayune Butler for his size and Alias Beast Butler for his general order directing,

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quote, that hereafter, when any female shall by word, gesture or movement insult or show

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No contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held

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liable to be treated as a woman of the town, plying her avocation.

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Hearing of this order to treat southern ladies as prostitutes, Lord Palmerston observed an

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Englishman must blush to think that such an act has been committed by one belonging to

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the Anglo-Saxon race.

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And Baton Rouge, 20-year-old Sarah Morgan, hearing the rumor of Pamerson's reaction,

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wondered what kind of men these Yankees were.

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Oh, free America, she writes.

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You who uphold free people, free speech, free everything.

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What a foul blot of despotism rests on a once spotless name.

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A nation of brave men who wage war on women and lock them up in prisons for using their

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woman's weapon, the tongue.

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In excoriating, quote, a nation of free people who advocate despotism, young Sarah also noted

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the extraordinary care they take to suppress all news, excepting what they themselves manufacture.

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Much of the Norse manufactured news were the atrocity stories of rebel soldiers stabbing

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doctors who were trying to save their lives, massacring civilians, etc.

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The big atrocity story of the war was the so-called massacre that took place when Bedford

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Forrest stormed Fort Pillow. According to an editorial in the New York Tribune, and

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an editorial was echoed repeatedly in congressional hearings, Forrest was accused of egging his

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men on to slaughter women and children. He burned wounded men alive and buried the living

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with the dead. The kernel of truth in all these fantastic tales is that many of Forrest's

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The Rebels' men were from families that had been forced to endure the arrogance of Union soldiers, both former slaves and the local Unionists they called homemade Yankees.

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The defenders who had been drinking heavily taunted the Rebels, who in their moment of victory took the opportunity for private vengeance.

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When General Forrest, arriving late on the scene, realized what was happening, he did his best to put a stop to the massacre.

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The other notorious tale of Southern atrocities was the raid on Lawrence, Kansas.

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The horrors were real enough.

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Captain Quantrill told his men, kill every man big enough to hold a gun, which meant in practice any boy 14 years old and up.

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But why?

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In the first place, Quantrill's men had been forced to fight under the black flag, neither taking nor giving quarter,

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More specifically, Lawrence was home to the worst Kansas Jayhawkers, men like Congressman

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Jim Lane, who had led expeditions of plunder and slaughter across the border into Missouri.

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But the crucial impetus for this raid had been Brigadier General Thomas Ewing's decision

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and to round up and in turn the female relatives of men thought to be Confederate guerrillas.

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Taken to Kansas City, many of the women were herded into a dilapidated building that Ewing

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had been told repeatedly was unsafe.

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When the building collapsed, killing four women and maiming many others, Quantrill and

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his lieutenants decided upon revenge.

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Bill Anderson, one of whose sisters had been killed and another injured in the collapse,

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and a message declaring that since the Yankees had made war upon women, they could expect

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the same. But in the very bloody event, neither Anderson nor any of the other guerrillas laid

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a hand upon the women of Kansas. But instead of learning humanity from his mistakes, General

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Ewing issued his famous General Order No. 11, forcing the immediate evacuation of all

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Missouri families from the border area where their homes were pillaged and burned by the

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of Kansas Troops. For years afterward, it was known as the Burt District. John McCorkle,

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whose sister was one of the four women killed in Kansas City, spoke for all of Quantrill's

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men when they heard General Order XI. We could stand no more.

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Frank James and Cole Younger had been at Lawrence, and when the war was over, the Youngers and

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Jameses found it hard to resume normal life. If the stories are true, Frank's brother

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Senator Jesse was seriously wounded trying to surrender to the Yankees.

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During the war years, Quantrill and Anderson had taken to robbing Yankee banks as a means

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of financing their operations, and some of the boys saw no reason to quit practicing

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a profession just when they were beginning to get good at it.

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They even took to robbing trains, a habit frowned upon by the Yankee-owned railroads

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who hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to track down and kill the outlaws.

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The detectives did not succeed in getting the James brothers, but they did attack their

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mother's house on January 26th, 1875, and hurled some kind of incendiary device through

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the window.

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The result was an explosion that killed Frank and Jesse's nine-year-old half-brother and

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blew off most of their mother's right hand, forcing it to be amputated.

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There were those at the time who called it murder.

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Some even complained when the governor of Missouri bribed one of Jesse's men to kill

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him.

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Jesse, living under the name Mr. Howard, was shot in his back as he was hanging a picture

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in his mother's house by Robert Ford, the dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard and

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laid poor Jesse in his grave.

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What does all this banditry have to do with war, much less with war as understood by Homer

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and Euripides?

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It has everything.

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Odysseus, returning to Ithaca after 20 years, finds his wife besieged by men who would stop at nothing to get at her person and property, men who even plot to kill her son.

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Odysseus, in what is the most beautiful scene of all the literature of the world, mercilessly kills every last one of them, knowing full well he faces a feud with their families.

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The only war worth fighting for is a war in defense of your wife, your children, your parents, and your home.

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In the famous lines of Lord Macaulay,

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for how can man die better than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the altars of his gods?

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We Americans, as subjects of a metastasizing world empire,

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know all too well that war is indeed the health of the state,

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and that every display of muscle in Bosnia, Iraq and Somalia is being matched by similar displays against the American people.

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In 1875, a corrupt state government refused to punish Pinkerton agents for firebombing a home in the name of law and order.

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In 1994, the highest legal official of the United States is the person who sent in the tanks against the home of David Koresh.

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David Koresh. When the Pinkertons own and operate the country, it is high time for the

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rest of us to realize that a virtual state of war exists between the government and the

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people of the United States. If this be paranoia, gentlemen, then let us make the most of it.