My last article about United States history left out one of the government’s greatest achievements: A civil war that was the bloodiest and heaviest in casualties than any other war in U.S. history. There were so many dead, to this day, we still don’t know how many died but it could be as high as 750,000. That’s higher than World War Two which had weapons not even in the planning stages during the Civil War. Indeed, we ARE “The Greatest Nation On Earth” if we are discussing numbers of dead racked up during a civil war.
Why am I bringing this up now? Because there is an interesting dynamic going on with the way our government sees the Syrian Civil War. The United States government seems wholly unable to understand the concept and motivation of revenge. This is because the government thinks everyone sees things as they do geopolitically. That is, everyone is motivated by philosophic raw sewage that percolates from the doleful cesspools of government-subsidized “think tanks”. And “think tanks” they are since septic tanks are the most astute comparison between the two.
The government doesn’t understand the nature of these terrorist attacks. In fact, the entire West seems unable to understand them. They are motivated by two things: Getting the West out of the Middle East and revenge for past offenses against the Middle East. When you are talking about tribal societies, revenge is absolutely a motivation to kill. We don’t have to go far. Look how long it took the Brits to subdue the Scots. We idolize William Wallace and cheer the movie “Braveheart” but then we cannot understand the Middle East has their own version of that struggle.
Let us return to our Civil War. This didn’t just happen one day thanks to someone violating a no-fly zone. This began in earnest at a period that immediately preceded it called “Bleeding Kansas”. Let me spell it out for you: Abolitionist religious fanatics waged a jihad against people they believed to be pro-slavery Missourians. If you see a famous painting of John Brown holding a Sharps carbine in one hand and a Bible in the other, long beard flowing, you’d swear that image came out of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Indeed, the abolitionist guerillas smuggled state-of-the-art Sharps rifles in crates labelled “Bibles”. They waged across the border hit-and-run attacks from Kansas into Missouri, all religiously motivated.
But Missourians didn’t go appeal to the federal government or beg for an 1800s version of UN peacekeepers to intervene. No, they crossed the border into Kansas and got revenge. This, in turn, gave the Kansans reason to cross the border into Missouri to get revenge. On and on it went with cross-border exchanges of gunfire and raids on towns and so on. Gosh, sounds like Syria, huh?
Once the Civil War began, this went on but the combatants morphed into guerilla armies with access to the weapons of their respective governments. The South had Quantrill’s Raiders who went to Kansas and settled scores for the actions of Union guerillas in Missouri. And there was actually a type of Union Army “SOCOM” operators in the form of a group called the “Redlegs” who basically operated outside of the law and committed what we would call today war crimes and atrocities. However, the federal government had actually authorized this with an early version of the Patriot Act called “Order 11".
These hit-and-run raids were all motivated by one thing as far as the men who participated in them: Revenge. Union Redlegs and other “off the books” covert military units had the authority to go in and wipe out towns they suspected were Confederate sympathizers. Now, this angered the survivors who would then ride with Confederate guerillas in order to get revenge. They didn’t give a darn about the Confederate cause or politics. They wanted to get even for losing their farms and families. It really is as simple as that. You would think the federal government would understand that as far as Syria.
How is the Syrian Civil War markedly different from ours if you boil it down to the motivating factors for individual combatants? Now groups such as ISIS can trigger attacks anywhere they please with seeming impunity. Quantrill’s Raiders rode hard into Lawrence, Kansas and sacked the whole town and the government cannot understand how ISIS can get into Europe or the United States and launch attacks? My word, people, travel is easier than horseback now! We don’t know what the modern United States government Redlegs have been up to in the Middle East that might be motivating revenge. It could be as simple as someone’s son or dad got killed by some covert U.S. military group and now the dad or son needs a scalp for it. They’re not going to give up until they get those scalps. Why is that so hard to understand?
Look, this can go on for the next twenty years. See here, our Civil War actually began in the 1850s with Bleeding Kansas. We know the attacks from al-Qaida began in the early 1990s and they’re still in the game, too. And that was all motivated by revenge. We like to think humanity is somewhat different than the 1800s. How so, when we have the SAME government that waged a total war against its own people? Who are we to criticize Bashar al-Assad? Look what we did to our own people! We came up with the idea of destroying entire cities in that war. That was the very birth of an idea that led directly to the creation of the atomic bomb.
The United States government, with the help of Europe, has set into motion a chain of events that will always cause these terrorist attacks to occur. Every “retaliation” (revenge) for these attacks will kill people that the members of those peoples’ clans and tribes must get revenge for. That is the cohesive agreement in clans and tribes: An attack upon one must be avenged by all. I’d say by now, there’s probably several thousand men that are bound by ancient codes to avenge the deaths of thousands of others. And this is not hard to comprehend. We did this in Bleeding Kansas! Our own Civil War spawned these types of attacks over and over again.
So wake up, the world. This isn’t going away because you sit down and hammer out some bogus peace treaty or cease-fire. Huh, treaties are made to be broken and no one knows that better than the United States government. They only thing is, they just don’t get it when that works both ways in the quest for revenge.
