The ancient Romans in their venerable Republic were a pretty smart bunch, until they started worshipping big government and raiding the public treasury. One of my favorite ancient Roman writers and heroes is Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C.--43B.C.). A noted lawyer and unfailing defender of the dying Roman Republic, he was a keen observer of the decline leading to the ultimate death of that Republic, and was eventually assassinated by the Roman version of total government in the form of the followers of General Marc Antony, one of the assassinated aspiring dictator, Julius Caesar’s, loyal toadies. Before Cicero made his decision to oppose the rising dictatorship that was destroying the Republic, he wrote these famous words: “Patria est communis omnium parens”, which means—“The fatherland is the common parent of usall”. I’m sure that most of us would agree with this sentiment, but just what is our American “fatherland”?
Webster’s dictionary defines “fatherland” as “one’s native land”. However, I believe it goes much deeper than just where we were born, as important as that is. I believe the concept of “fatherland” encompasses the essence of who we are as a people—helping to define our history, our traditions, and our culture. In that great Welsh patriotic song, Men of Harlech, (the music for which dates to the late 18th century or even earlier, although the many verse variations are more modern), written to commemorate the 1468 battle to defend Harlech Castle against a multi-year siege by English invaders, one verse reads: “Onward! ‘Tis the country needs us, He is bravest, he who leads us. Honor’s self now proudly heads us, Freedom, God, and Right.”
Like the Welsh, our common shared history is an important part of our “fatherland” identity. The innate need for freedom, the love of God, and the belief in the rightness of our American spirit, have always been as important a part of who we are as is the sacred ground we inhabit. So, just what is “Fatherland America”, and who brought it into being?
One of the concerns about discussing the concept of a “fatherland” is the memory (especially among those of us who are “experienced” citizens) of the horrible crimes against humanity that the fascist and barbaric Nazis perpetrated upon Europe during the 1930’s and half of the 1940’s, as they equated their concept of a German “fatherland” with racial hatred, racial “purity”, and brutal military conquest, which the Nazis insisted were the acceptable reasons to love their concept of a “fatherland”. But that kind of brutality and evil is not the meaning of “fatherland” that Christians and patriots need to embrace.
We know that the country we call “The United States of America” was conceived on the Green of Lexington, Massachusetts on the cold and misty morning of April 19, 1775. It had its “labor pains” two months later at The Battle of Bunker Hill, and was “born” under the Articles of Confederation for six years starting in 1781. It began to grow to maturity in Independence Hall in Philadelphia when our present Constitution was written in 1787.
Of course, “fatherland America” took centuries to develop, and required much blood and pain to make us the God-honoring country we once were. A great number of ordinary men and women, and a few extraordinary ones, sacrificed much to make us a country, as they slowly and painfully extended freedom to almost all Americans, while simultaneously resisting the anti-Constitution, anti-Federalism efforts of the despisers of liberty who have always been among us, and who, even in the earliest days of our history as an independent nation, had a much different vision for the country we call the U.S.A. Their plotting descendants still have that “different vision” for our nation that their ancestors entertained, and they must be resisted, peacefully if possible, but RESISTED! Let’s all hope and pray that President Trump will drive those disgusting slugs back under their rocks where they belong.
The original idea for our “fatherland America” began in the South---in St. Augustine, Florida to be exact—by our Spanish Forefathers. In August of 1565, Admiral Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles, as the newly appointed Governor of Florida, landed at the site of a Timucuan Indian village called Seloy, with 600 soldiers and settlers. It wasn’t recorded whether or not he paid the locals anything for the site, but he quickly fortified it and named it St. Augustine. There were no women with this initial settlement, since it was mostly military in nature. The natives soon decided that they didn’t appreciate foreign land grabbers, but the Spanish were there to stay.
Not to be outdone by her Spanish rivals, Queen Elizabeth 1 of England had Sir Walter Raleigh send a group of military adventurers and “gentlemen” to Roanoke Island, on the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina but what was then known as “Virginia”. In the year 1585, a military expedition commanded by Sir Richard Grenville established the first English settlement (not really a colony) at Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island, to check the influence of the Spanish in Florida. (I’ve walked over the site of this first English fort, quite small compared to other forts I’ve visited, and it must have been a bleak and forbidding place at that time). Again, this settlement was military in nature, poorly planned, and had no women to make it permanent. Of course, no payment for the land was made to the locals, who quickly became hostile after the English took some of them as hostages and burned their villages (a bad habit that the English often exhibited during their “Empire” building years). Disease and low food supplies also took their toll, and on June 18, 1586 this first English settlement ended in disorder and acrimony, and the remaining expedition members returned to England.
Sir Walter Raleigh planned a little better for Her Majesty’s next attempt at colonizing, for this time he included women, who are the true civilizers. Around 35 years ago I walked among the Spanish moss shrouded giant pines and oaks in the forest on Roanoke Island. It is empty today, a lovely but lonely spot. But somewhere in that forest, or perhaps now underwater (the site has never been discovered), in July of 1587, a small band of English colonists---our next group of Forefathers and Mothers---59 men, 17 women, and 11 children, under Governor John White---began to carve out a settlement. Problems with disease, an unfamiliar climate, hostile Native People (who remembered the first English intruders), and unfamiliarity with farming in that new climate, all took their toll. Hunger and low supplies soon became serious. In August, 1587 the surviving colonists asked Governor White to return to England to obtain new supplies and more colonists. He reluctantly left his daughter, Eleanor White Dare, and his new grand daughter, Virginia Dare, and the remaining colonists, and sailed back to England for more supplies and more warm bodies, with an expected absence of six months.
Unfortunately for the Roanoke colonists, the war with Spain began raging at that time, with the 1588 invasion by the Spanish Armada against England postponing Governor White’s plans to return quickly to the colony. It was August of 1590 before White returned to Roanoke. In vain he searched for the colonists, and his family members, but they
had all vanished into the mists of legend, with only one cryptic clue, the word “Croatoan”, carved onto a fence post of their abandoned fort and the letters ‘CRO’ carved onto a nearby tree. History now refers to this group of brave English men and women as The Lost Colony. Every summer, in Manteo, North Carolina on Roanoke Island, there is a wonderful play of that name: The Lost Colony, that I saw during that trip. At the end of that exciting yet haunting drama, the remaining colonists slowly walk off the stage into a mist; the last man hesitates, turns to the audience, and says: “Remember us—remember us”. And I do!
Seventeen years later, the Virginia Company, the next group of Forefathers and Mothers who helped to establish America, left England in December of 1606, and landed at what they named Jamestown on the barren Virginia coast on May 14, 1607. This colonizing attempt numbered 108 settlers, including women. The English soon came under attack from the hostile Algonquian Native People, for they had built their fort in the middle of one of the greatest Indian empires on America’s east coast—the Powhatan Confederacy. (Let’s not forget that the ORIGINAL inhabitants of America should also be considered to be our Forefathers). According to Professor Ervin Jordan Jr. of the University of Virginia, these initial settlers “were a mixed bag of “gentlemen”, adventurers, servants (not slaves), and assorted ne’er-do-wells, all of whom sought adventure and quick profits from gold, timber, and tobacco.” To be fair, they also proclaimed that bringing the “Gospel of Christ” to the native population was one of their goals.
Jamestown was the first capital of what we know as Colonial America, and was the first permanent settlement in British North America. The Virginia General Assembly, the first representative government on our continent, initially met in the summer of 1619, and remains America’s oldest continuously operating legislature. Other firsts for Jamestown were the first English celebration of Christmas in the New World in 1607, and the first cultivation of tobacco as a cash crop, which led, to our great shame, to the first black slaves brought by a Dutch ship in 1619, and the use of these slaves (with vast numbers to follow) on their plantations. After a long series of wars with the Native People, bad weather, and fires which eventually burned much of Jamestown to the ground, it fell into decline and in 1699 the capital of Virginia was transferred to Williamsburg. The site reverted mostly to farmland and a few now excavated ruins
Up to and including the settlement of Jamestown in 1607, the emphasis of all the explorers and colonists was primarily military in nature, with the search for ways to become wealthy paramount in the minds of most of the English who ventured to the barren shores of North America., The proclamation of Christ’s Gospel was supposedly also on the minds of those adventurers, but seldom in their “deeds”. The establishment of permanent settlements, with women and children and an emphasis on extending the Christian religion, including the conversion of the Native population, was always claimed to be a goal, (even stretching back to Christopher Columbus), but often ended up on the back burner in those very early days. Antagonism between the settlers and the Native People was always a problem and soured peaceful relations.
But there was one colony---one group of Forefathers and Mothers---whose motivation for helping to found “fatherland America” was much different. They were members of the wider Puritan movement in England, but they called themselves PILGRIMS, and practiced ‘separation’ from the Church of England which historically persecuted them in varying degrees. As I’ve written before on several occasions, the Mayflower Pilgrims were a small group of Christians from ONE local church congregation in Leiden, Holland, where they had been living for almost 12 years beginning in 1608, after fleeing severe religious persecution in England, perpetrated upon them by The Church of England and King James 1. After a hazardous and totally uncomfortable 66 day voyage across the cold and stormy Atlantic Ocean, they arrived in North America in late 1620 on the desolate and freezing shores of what they had planned as their intended site near the mouth of the Hudson River but which, in God’s Providence (possibly a storm and “possibly” deliberate misnavigation by Captain Jones), turned out to be Cape Cod. After several exploratory trips in their small sailing shallop, they began building “New Plimouth” (original spelling), the only place along that vast coastline where the local, potentially hostile population of Native People had been decimated by a plague, probably smallpox introduced by European fishermen.
Even though half of these Pilgrims died that first harsh winter of 1620/21, they believed that God had placed them right where He wanted them to be. They had incurred what was, in those days, an enormous debt to establish their religiously oriented colony, so trading with the native population for furs and timber was paramount on their minds. This debt was eventually repaid in full to their backers in England, the Merchant Adventurers. These Pilgrims, with very few exceptions, treated the Native population respectfully, and even signed a peace treaty with Chief Massasoit which was respected by both sides for 50 or more years, or until the King Phillip War. The Pilgrims always purchased the land belonging to the locals. Would that all of the early settlers and colonists had exhibited the same Christian motivation and mostly honorable behavior that these, our Pilgrim Forefathers and Mothers, did. Our history would have been much different, less violent, and more pleasing to our Creator, in my opinion.
Why dwell on this ancient history and talk about our Fore Parents? Because the concept of “fatherland”, or HERITAGE, is being increasingly ridiculed and denigrated by the socialist/Marxist/fascist promoters of a “New World Order” who want to establish their philosophy of government on the entire planet, and especially on the United States! They know that people who don’t understand what brought about their special “PATRIA” over the centuries can be duped into accepting a socialist world government with all the trappings of a modern day imperial tyranny. This process has been surreptitiously under way for well over two centuries, led by its modern public face, the treasonous and anti-American sovereignty Council on Foreign Relations since its founding in 1921.
Even today, many who call themselves Republicans and Democrats are salivating over merging our country into a world government controlled by the Marxist dominated and America-hating United Nations Organization. The recently passed “USMEXICOCANADA” (USMCA) so called “trade agreement” so eagerly and UNWISELY promoted and signed by President Trump, and so strongly advocated by The Council on Foreign Relations (C.F.R.), established a governing “Free Trade Commission” comprised of unelected representatives from all three countries who will not only oversee the implementation of this agreement over several years, but will also oversee a vast bureaucracy composed of 19 committees, each governing different sections of USMCA, and they have the power to amend this agreement—thereby making it “a living agreement”, allowing for REGIONAL GOVERNMENT infrastructures to be established, toward the long sought goal of A NORTH AMERICAN UNION, under the control of the despicable, America-hating, and Marxist dominated United Nations Organization!
Tragically, many Republicans and all Demoncrats are but two peas in the same collectivist, big government pod, for both of those groups seem to love the concept of our country, the United States, being one part of many under a strong and dominating world government, thereby basically destroying the essence of our “American Fatherland”. (But then, BOTH of our political parties are dominated and influenced by that subversive, anti-sovereignty cabal called The Council on Foreign Relations—the CFR that I mentioned above--a long-time proponent of a North American Union and a “world government” under the Marxist-dominated United Nations Organization. (Or if necessary, another even more tyrannical global cabal should the U.N. prove incapable of establishing a truly totalitarian planet-wide dictatorship). Essentially the C.R.R. is the surreptitious and real ‘invisible government’ (i.e. the brains of the “Deep State”) of the United States, and has been at least since the days of that racist progressive and Constitution hater, President Woodrow Wilson.)
Should this happen, I trust that future Americans will remember just who it was that destroyed the sovereignty of our “fatherland”—that turned our Founders’ dreams of ‘a nation under law’ into the freedom destroying and liberty mocking ‘North American Union of Socialist Republics’—a mongrelized collection of disparate nations all struggling to survive “democracy”! The revenge enacted upon these traitors by the American people would be swift and sweet!
However, some of us are striving to prevent that from happening to our “fatherland”, and we invite YOU to join us! We’re called “The John Birch Society”, a band of patriotic men and women dedicated, since 1958, to preserving the Constitutional Republic that our Founders gave to us at such a great cost to themselves. Log onto JBS.org and investigate how YOU can help us preserve our increasingly attacked heritage of liberty under law. We cannot be absolutely assured that President Trump and his hopefully conservative/patriotic allies can “Drain the Swamp” over the next four years. Help us NOW, before it’s too late.
