Back in 1899, at the start of the Boer War (in South Africa), in an essay titled, “The Old Issue”, Rudyard Kipling wrote, “All we have of freedom—all we use or know—this our fathers bought for us, long and long ago”. At that time, the British Empire and its influence (for good or ill) extended over much of the world. British “freedom”—at least as defined by Parliament and the English Monarchy—prevailed over most of its polyglot peoples, with or without their approval.
The British defined “freedom” to their conquered colonial peoples as the culture and traditions and laws that prevailed in Great Britain, modified as circumstances required for each group of “colonized” people, and graciously extended by the English King or Queen and Parliament to make them “fit” British subjects. Kipling’s words, while historically significant, are both true and untrue at the same time. British “Americans” learned early in their relations with the English Monarchy that, while they considered themselves as having the same freedoms as all Englishmen, those same Englishmen in Great Britain didn’t see the colonists in the same light of freedom and as having the same rights as those colonists always believed they had.
We all should know the struggles that our forebears went through in their resistance to tyranny. For decades our Revolutionary ancestors suffered the indignities perpetrated upon them as “lesser class” Englishmen by the “upper classes” in Parliament (particularly in The House of Lords) and the Monarchy. Eventually they realized that their only recourse against the tyranny of the mother country was to resist it, peacefully at first, then with organized protests led by groups of patriotic “Englishmen” in the not-yet-“American” colonies, and eventually, when peaceful means and appeals to justice failed them, with the violence of armed rebellion.
These Revolutionary ancestors of ours did win political freedom for themselves and for their posterity—for us. Of course, they were not the first people to battle the enemies of human liberty, for our patriot ancestors used the examples of other, earlier people that fought the same fight in other lands long before them. One well-known example to these “proto-Americans” was the protracted resistance against the encroachment on their independence by the people of Scotland, who battled the attempted conquest of Scotland by the English Monarchy for many generations. Our ancestors knew well the resistance led by William “Braveheart” Wallace (ca. 1270-1305) and Robert 1 the Bruce (King of Scotland), (1274-1329), and were forced, ultimately, to do likewise.
The inspiring “Declaration of Arbroath” of 1320 A.D. came out of this conflict. Considered as Scotland’s “Declaration of Independence”, it was formulated by Scottish Patriots who had resisted the invasion of their country by the British, and written down at Arbroath Abbey by Bernard of Kilwinning, then the Chancellor of Scotland and Abbot of Arbroath. It’s a long document, not totally accurate historically, but its pertinent lines read:
“…for as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”
Those noble words, as they apply today to our struggle to resist the rule of our increasingly authoritarian and unconstitutional federal government, should be forever carved into the hearts and minds of Americans who want to remain free! Those determined Scots gave us brave but bloody examples of their resistance to tyranny. Our ancestors on the sacred Green of Lexington, on the embattled Bunker Hill, on Kings Mountain, at Cowpens, at Saratoga, and at Yorktown proved that dedicated patriots who determined to resist the aggressive authoritarianism of government could change their future in a positive way. And for many generations they did so. (Listening to the Marxist/communist “ravings” of Comrade KommieLa, during her “campaigning” for the Demoncrat party’s office of POTUS, it is easy to conjecture that WE who consider ourselves to be “patriots” today may have to do the same things that our ancestors did!)
However, we need to know more than just the fact that our patriot ancestors won freedom for themselves and for us. We must always remember that it takes courage and dedication for any people to retain their freedom, for by its very nature, any government that is formed for the best of reasons, like I believe ours was originally, has in it the seeds of tyranny. Freedom is a very fragile thing, and the agents of “the evil one” are ALWAYS among us, like the weeds in the wheat field that our Savior told us about in His Word.
These “weeds of tyranny” are surely among us today, here in America. We see them on our news reports every day and night, as they pompously and piously proclaim how wonderful and dedicated to our freedom are those currently in power in The District of Criminals and Communists, or as some of us call it—the “Deep State”, or “The Swamp”, and how dastardly our former President Trump acted during his first term because he wanted to “drain that swamp” and rid our government of the slimy “swamp dwellers” who despise us and our constitutional liberties (and believe me, they DO despise us).
Needless to say, those “swamp dwellers” bitterly resisted President Trump’s sometimes ineffective attempts to dislodge them from their swampy nests of power and influence. (As of today, they have tried TWICE to assassinate President Trump during his 2024 campaign for the office of POTUS, and the lowlifes in the District of Criminals & Communists who are charged with protecting him—as a former POTUS and a present candidate for that office—are desperately trying to keep Congressional investigating committees and the American people from discovering their perfidy and treasonous actions by their refusal to adequately protect him).
Today these scumbags are called “Democrats”, but I call them “DEMONCRATS”! How else could we describe their “political antics” and anti-constitutional attacks on the noble system of Federalism that our Founders gave to us? (Attacks that are often aided by their RINO and NEOCON allies). I don’t always agree with Mark Levin in everything he says, but he is truly CORRECT in what he wrote in his recent book, “THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HATES AMERICA”! It really does HATE the America of our Founders, and it always has! That historic hatred was the “raison d’etre” for that party’s founding back in the late 1820’s, as the shadowy Jacobins who hatched it determined that living in a CONSTITUTIONALLY RESTRICTED republic was, in the long run, intolerable to them!.
I believe that we Americans have always been expected to perform good, even great, works in our battles for freedom. But this battle between liberty and tyranny was not in 1775, nor is it now, a purely secular one. It has been and forever will be a mostly spiritual battle. I’ve always believed that our God heard the cries of our oppressed ancestors as they called to Him, and He comforted them and told them great and mighty things (especially through the “Black (Robed) Regiment” of colonial times). He was pleased to answer their prayers for freedom, and gave His people the power to eventually triumph over their oppressors, for His people in those days glorified our Heavenly Father and believed that, “…greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world.” (1 John 4:4).
As I’ve written previously, our Forefathers and Mothers who established our unique Constitutional Republic gave us something that had not been experienced more than briefly by any people---a constitutional form of government wherein ordinary people, who were not a part of some aristocracy, could govern themselves and prosper. They gave us a society—not a perfect or flawless one—and one in which not all of us were yet free--wherein no one had to bow in fear before any oligarch—be he a king or a general (or a ‘slimy’ politician who seeks to lord his ‘authority’ over the people)—nor suffer from the arbitrary laws of those who had usurped power for themselves.
These Fore Parents gave us a society wherein everyone could hold his or her head high and look upwards to God, not down at the boots of an oppressor. Our Fore Parents, some who were people of Faith and some who were not, truly saw beyond the years of their lives, and looked down the generations to those alive today. They gave us hope and freedom and self-respect. They gave us the courage to right the wrongs that have existed among us at times. They sacrificed more than we will ever know to pass that heritage of liberty to us, in their noble dreams of things to come. My great hope, my fellow Americans, is that we will never forget this, and that we will never basely forego what those who came before us sacrificed so mightily to win for themselves and especially for US!
Is “freedom”, as we Americans have always understood the concept, threatened with extinction, even in our time? Are we Americans allowing it to be dissipated right in front of our eyes? Perhaps. It has been sorely threatened in past times by the disciples of evil who despised the very existence of men and women who refused to submit to the tyranny of their time and place without resistance. Those disciples of evil, who despise the historic mandate of limited, constitutional government, are among us to this day, in vast numbers and who exercise great power all throughout our economy and our culture and the government that was supposed to belong to and be controlled by the American people (NOT by corporate oligarchs, lobbyists, authoritarians, and Karl Marx’s disciples). They have operated for decades like “cancer cells” in our body of freedom, slowly growing in influence until today they are major “tyrannical tumors” threatening to destroy our body politic, and threatening to destroy our free way of life.
Each one of us measures the “conception” of freedom with our own yardstick. What is freedom for one may be license for another. But the concept is the same, and must be treasured and protected from one generation to the next, despite the denigrations perpetrated upon it by today’s despicable progressive lovers of “group think” and “woke” absurdities and asinine “pronoun” stupidities.
Gail Goodwin reflected well on freedom on her website, Inspire Me Today, in 2014. She wrote:
“We are born with the spark of freedom that burns brightly within all of
us, no matter where we live geographically or what we may experience politically. Freedom is the opportunity to do what we want, when we want, and choose how we want to do it. It’s following that voice inside, no matter where it might lead and oft times walking to a different drummer. It is the ability to think our own thoughts and make our own choices. Collectively, freedom can be expressed as a small group or as a country, but it always starts within the mind and the heart of an individual.”
True words! Back on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2003 I visited Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, and stood virtually on the exact spot where, in March of 1775, Founding Father Patrick Henry proclaimed to his countrymen: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.” Death did come for many of his friends and compatriots over the next eight years, as it has come for countless men and women over the centuries since, as they stood against the Destroyers of Liberty, against the Marauders of our Freedom, on far-flung battlefields or in the streets of their very own towns. But these “destroyers and marauders” don’t always threaten our liberties with weapons of violence. Today their threats are exercised with the warfare of serpent’s tongues and with both subtle and bold lies and vague innuendos and partial truths in the realms of electronic media and newsprint. But their threats to our liberties are just as dangerous as were (and might again be) those posed by dictatorial enemies with vast armies.
Patrick Henry and his fellow Revolutionary Founders realized that freedom would have to be purchased at a high price--- that it was not then, nor ever will be—free. And they DID pay that high price, both for their own liberties, and for OURS! President John Quincy Adams left us words that should pierce the hearts of all Americans unto the farthest generations, when he said: “You will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”
That’s my hope, also. I pray that my fellow Americans, and indeed anyone who reads these words anywhere or anytime, will value their liberty just as they did, and resolve to do likewise if necessary, because often throughout the annals of history the freedom once possessed by a people was lost to them, and a long and painful and bloody struggle had to be endured to re-earn it. That determination is what it has always taken, and always will take, to nurture the concepts of human liberty that we Americans profess to believe, and which we’d like to transmit to our farthest posterity. May we all be up to that task!
As our ancient ancestors reminded us:
AUT VIVIMUS UT LIBERI AUT SERVI MORIMUR!
“REPUGNANTIA TYRANNIS EST OBEDIENTIA DEI!”
I really do hope that you agree with them!
