Long May It Wave

Of course I love America, the land, the people, the capitalist system (distorted as it is), and the opportunities still afforded those who intelligently seek them. What I don't like about America is the government. Everything the government does makes things a little worse; makes living a little harder. Government, and those who are employed therein, have forgotten that they are working for Americans, and they are a tool to do the things Americans want them to do, under the limits of the terms of our Contract--the Constitution of the United States and its Amendments.

In Great Britain, and many other countries, the king/queen/chief/emir/fuhrer/tsar.....and even president, is the supreme entity and the people work for his benefit. The United States was founded to put an end to this obvious tripe, but little by little, we've forgotten.

More and more, as each generation graduates from the government schools, it's deeper ingrained that the federal government is the ruler and the people must obey its edicts. The Constitution is largely ignored and the meaning of the Bill of Rights is diminished.

Part of the propaganda that prepares youngsters to accept the supreme power of the federal government is The Pledge of Allegiance.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy, a socialist baptist minister in 1892. It was first published in The Youth's Companion magazine later that year, in a shorter form that that to which we've become accustomed. It's been altered slightly a few times since, the most recent change made by Dwight Eisenhower in 1954, in which he added the words, "under god." He didn't specify which god, but I assume he meant Thor, the Norse god of war, who seems to be today's most closely followed god by Washington DC.

The Pledge was clearly devised, by Mr Bellamy, to be a propaganda tool to indoctrinate our youth in the government's schools to accept the (alleged) superiority of government over the masses.

When I was in school, we recited the Pledge each and every morning at the beginning of the school day. We placed our hands over our hearts and recited the words aloud, having memorized them in first grade. I recall when they told us the pledge had been changed, that we had to add the words "under god" after "one nation." In what may have been my first act of political rebellion, I never accepted those two added words. I didn't think they belonged.

Years later, I realized that a pledge to the ever-growing federal government, the entity represented by the flag in this context, doesn't belong. It was adopted as a declaration of subservience of the people to the state.

Mr Bellamy knew what he was doing, and it seems to be working. Increasingly, over the decades, most Americans have become used to their accepted subservience.

Sad.

They've killed Freedom! Those bastards!

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California