Liberia House in Manassas, Virginia

Liberia House stands in the middle of a beautiful green pasture, a flower garden, a cemetery, a walking trail with a brook surrounded by woods and an apiary, with buzzing busy bees covered in pollen. The locust trees are just blooming and greening.

The Weir cemetery at the bottom of the hill is shaded by a lugubrious tree in the corner, leaning at a 45-degree angle and exposing its roots like a trailing mantle, delivering the nutrients of plant life. Not even sunshine can make this tree look inviting in this symphony of early spring colors.

If Liberia House could talk, it would enumerate an endless list of famous and ordinary Americans who have walked through its doors: Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, Gen. Irvin McDowell, and countless unknown soldiers who were wounded in the Civil War and sought refuge and care in Liberia.

The house was built in 1925 by W. J. Weir on land formerly owned by “King” Carter. It was Gen. Beauregard’s headquarters from May 1861 until after the First Battle of Manassas, July 21, 1861.

According to archives, Jefferson Davis “watched the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861, and then came here to Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard’s headquarters to meet with him and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston before returning to Richmond on July 23. Lincoln came here with his Secretary of War on June 19, 1862, to visit Gen. Irvin McDowell, who was recovering after his horse fell on him.”

During restoration of Liberia, numerous signatures were found on the walls on the second floor, written by Union soldiers stationed here. They wanted to be remembered; that they were alive in that moment in time. A graffiti from March or August 1862, written by Pvt. Adam McKelvey, Co. G. 12^th Pennsylvania Infantry Reserve Regiment, can be found among others who signed their names for posterity, knowing that death was stalking them.

Liberia was the place where the Weir family raised their children and grandchildren. The plantation was so vast, it encompassed most of the land of Manassas today. There were slaves in bondage here, and “a beer baron from Alexandria operated a dairy farm on the property.”

An archive photograph from 1862 shows Liberia with an intact kitchen wing on the right. The museum curators believe that it was probably destroyed during the war and never rebuilt.

Liberia’s owners, William James Weir, and Harriet had planted daffodils alongside the front walk of the house. A photograph from March 1862 shows the yellow blooms when the house was occupied by Union troops. The daffodils somehow survived the encampment of two armies amid the Civil War.

The Turberville Memorial Garden today is planted with common plants in Virginia that are supporting pollinators of the current apiary.

William J. Weir complained to Confederate soldiers early in the war about the loss of his fruit trees. In 1863, an edition of Harpers New Monthly Magazine reported that Weir was said to have been ‘shut up in the guardhouse for saying, as he witnessed his fruit trees being made into firewood, that he didn’t know as he would be used any worse by the Yankees than he had been by those who professed to be his friends’.

Private George Bagby of Virginia’s 11^th Infantry wrote in 1861 during his time in Liberia: “At night I would walk out in the garden and brood over the possible result of this slow way of making war. The garden looked toward the battlefield. At times I thought I detected the odor of the carcasses, lightly buried there; at others I fancied I heard weird and doleful cries borne on the night wind.” (Museum Archives)

The Weir family owned 2,000 acres of farmland and forest so far from settled areas that it required barns, a dairy, a gristmill, a laundry, a kitchen, slave quarters, a school, a general store, and a post office. The labor to maintain such a vast plantation was provided by “enslaved and white laborers and skilled craftsmen, alongside members of the Weir family.” They lived here for thirty-six years.

During the Civil War, the family was divided. William did not want secession, but his three sons served in the Confederate Army. The family moved to Fluvanna County. Walter inherited the property after his father’s death in 1867 but the farm never returned to its pre-war wealth.

Before the City of Manassas acquired the property in 1986, records show that:

1.      The property owned by William Weir encompassed most of modern-day Manassas (1825-1888) – Library of Congress

2.      Liberia was a dairy farm when owned by Alexandria businessman Robert Portner (1888-1947); the Portners never lived on the property  – Manassas Museum Collection

3.      Liberia was owned by the Breeden family (1947-1986) – Manassas Museum Collection

There is evidence from an ad placed in 1847 in the Alexandria Gazette that William Weir operated the Liberia Mathematical and Classical School on the premises.  A donation to the museum of a math exam with the words at the top of the page, ‘Liberia School,’ became further evidence of the school’s existence.

Walter Weir 

The Weir Cemetery appears too close to the house; that is because it was moved here in 1989 from its original site, Point of Woods East/Lakeside. With the family’s permission, 24 graves and headstones were moved by specialists at the Smithsonian Institution according to the original burial plans and plots. The exhumation revealed that only Walter’s remains were well preserved because he was buried in a cast iron coffin with a glass viewing pane. Walter’s body was so well preserved that forensic analysis revealed that “he died from an infection, likely caused by an abscessed tooth.”

Note:  Museum archive photos are black and white, color photographs: Ileana Johnson April 2023

 

 

Gaslighting in Democracy

Gaslighting is “the practice of psychologically manipulating someone into questioning their own sanity, memory, or powers of reasoning.” There are many daily examples of gaslighting coming from the media and corrupt politicians daily. The question remains, are those manipulated able to tell that they are manipulated and are they making corrections to the warped reality they have been convinced to believe and trust?

At the end of WWII, Germany was split into two parts. One part was controlled by the Allies minus the Russians, Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD), German Federal Republic or West Germany; the other part was controlled by the Russians, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, (DDR), German Democratic Republic or East Germany. That side of Germany, five states in total, was neither Democratic, nor a Republic, it was a dictatorship controlled by the Soviet-style Communist Party.

The Soviets made sure that a long border, a physical Iron Curtain, was built between the two German countries with a wide no-man’s land guarded by prison-like watchtowers with machine guns, guards, mines, trenches, and barbed wire. Sometimes this frontier ran through farms and pastures, splitting farmers’ lands. This border remained in place from 1949 until 1990 and it stretched 1,381 kilometers (858 miles) from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia. It was established on July 1, 1945 as a boundary between the Western and the Soviet occupation zones of Germany.

To forcibly keep the East German population trapped inside the socialist country, the border was built as “the world’s most heavily fortified, defined by a continuous line of high metal fences and walls, barbed wire, alarms, anti-vehicle ditches, watchtowers, automatic booby traps and minefields. It was patrolled by 50,000 armed East German border guards.”

This border reflected Winston Churchill’s ideological metaphor of the Iron Curtain that split the Soviet and the Western bloc countries during Cold War as an ideological boundary between capitalism and socialism/communism.

The city of Berlin itself was split into two parts, the Western side, and the Eastern side. West Berlin was democratic and free while East Berlin was communist and captive. The 27-mile long and tall Berlin Wall was built to divide the two city parts, separating families overnight, building the wall sometimes through the middle of a street. The first victim of the Berlin Wall was a lady named Ida whose apartment building was on the side of East Germany while the street was now in West Germany. She jumped and died on the way to the hospital. At the Berlin Wall, Thousands Tried Creative—and Dangerous—Ways to Get Across (history.com)

People communicated from their apartment windows across the street, over the wall. Many lost their lives in the process of trying to escape from East Germany to freedom in West Germany.  Many succeeded making it to the west by any means necessary, some creative, others daring, and others quite dangerous. Nobody is on record trying to flee to East Germany.

“Wolfgang Engels, a 19-year old East German soldier who helped build the barbed-wire fences that initially separated both Berlins, stole a tank and drove it through the wall itself.” He got caught in the barbed wire and was shot twice but managed to escape. . At the Berlin Wall, Thousands Tried Creative—and Dangerous—Ways to Get Across (history.com)

DDR or East Germany was held under the Communist Party control, with the help of the infamous STASI, the security police. It was a police state, and everyone lived in fear. Nobody could leave if they wanted to.

DDR was NOT a democratic republic, it was a socialist tyranny controlled by the police state under the rule of the Communist Party.

After the Berlin Wall came down and the two Germanys unified in 1989, Angela Merkel became their Chancellor from 2005-2021, the longest ruling chancellor in history. She attended the Karl Marx University where she received a degree in physics and worked in East Berlin; she earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry.

“Some of her former colleagues from the Central Institute of Physical Chemistry claimed that she was active as a secretary for agitation and propaganda at the Institute, though Merkel maintained that she was responsible for cultural affairs.”

Why the citizens of the former 16 states of the Federal Republic of Germany chose to elect her Chancellor, is hard to understand. The entire West Germany had to support the disastrous centralized economy of the East Germans and their poverty resulting from the Communist Party mismanaging and stealing resources for their own wealth.

When oblivious Americans advocate for democratic socialism, they are advocating for a dictatorship. But they think they are advocating for free stuff and government welfare provided by the free market like in the Scandinavian countries. But these Scandinavian countries are not socialist, they support socialized health care and other generous welfare; they have a robust economy derived from free markets and companies that operate without direct government control and pay confiscatory taxes.

Unfortunately for Americans advocating democratic socialism, they will get socialism with the Communist Party controlling the means of production or they will get fascism, where the omnipotent government will control corporations’ means of production and will tell them what to say and do, what to produce and distribute, all in line with the government’s fascist agenda. Unlike what you read online, nazis (fascists) were not far right groups, they were members of the National Socialist Party (Nationalsozialistische Partei).

 

Survival and Respect for Our Food Sources

I am obsessed with the show ALONE for several reasons. Number one is the killing of animals which I could not do. I do eat chicken and fish and I know how and where that meat comes from.

I watched my mom kill chickens and saw her holding its head while the body was dancing in the grass, dying. She then submerged the whole thing in boiling water to make it easier to pluck its feathers. I always left the tiny apartment because the smell made me sick to my stomach.

When I was growing up, I knew grandpa slaughtered a pig every year for the extended family during the Christmas feast, The red blood splattered in the white snow remains in my memory to this day. In retrospect, it did not look like a humane killing and the pig knew what was happening to him.

I remember grandpa burying a pig one year, far in the woods, because the village vet tech told him that it had trichinosis worms, and it was not fit for human consumption. 

A few of my childhood friends died of parasitic infestations, the result of living off the land, just like these contestants on ALONE. The children who died were not lucky to be live close to a medical clinic that could have treated them. There was no doctor assigned to the village even though it was only 10 km from a large city. The bus ran twice a day, but people had little money to travel.

I remember when Mom’s youngest sister used to take me and my best friend Steluta to the Prahova River. The water had the clarity of crystal and was so cold, coming down from the mountains. There were natural pockets between large boulders where the water was deeper, and large fish were trapped.

Prahova River

We played in the water with fishes swimming around us. We were hungry all the time, but it never occurred to us to try to catch any. We were afraid that someone would report us to the communist government, and we would go to jail. Technically everything belonged to the party, including the river, and we did not have their permission to fish.

The ALONE survival show brings to life for me the reality that every day we live, some creatures die to keep us alive. We just do not realize how much killing we do indirectly because someone else does the killing for us.

The reality show’s participants have revealed survival skills, gathering, hunting, fire building, shelter building, bow hunting, primitive survival, endurance in the face of starvation, standing up to large predatory animals, basket weaving, tool-carving, and other skills. They all have shown respect and gratitude for what they fished, hunted, and killed to eat. It was not pretty, but it was life.

Survivalists knew what plants to collect to supplement their food and which have medicinal properties. In our modern world, we are entirely removed from such knowledge, and from our meat sources if we consume meat.

Urbanites, who often are vegetarians, do not have gardens and have no idea how to plant, grow, and harvest vegetables and legumes; they are just as far removed from their food sources as meat eaters are.

A lady survivalist snared a squirrel. Momma squirrel came immediately, trying to revive her baby, and she was making all these crying sounds and chittering loudly. It was heartbreaking!

A survivalist from West Virginia who hunted and killed with his bow and arrow a beaver in Labrador, Canada, contracted giardiasis, a parasitical infection from the beaver meat - he called it ‘beaver fever.’

He had to undress down to his underwear and swim in the freezing water to retrieve the dead beaver’s body which was floating in the middle of the river. Hunger was stronger than the potential for hypothermia.

Within hours of consuming the undercooked beaver meat and fat, he got so sick that he had to tap out to seek medical attention. Was it the revenge of the beaver for killing him/her and leaving his/her mate alone for life? I have empathy for both the man and the poor beavers. But then larger animals maul humans all the time as well if they are in their habitat or vicinity, and they happen to be hungry.

Joe Keller wrote about his haunting hunting encounter. “I shot a deer once. Never again. There were two of them that jumped over a stone wall in the woods. The first was a doe and the second was a spike buck, three-four years old. I shot the buck, and it dropped on the spot. The doe was about 30 yards away and turned around. I called for my brothers-in-law, and they came running. We were all bent over the dead buck and the doe, its mother, stuck her head in-between us and tried to get the buck to stand up by nuzzling it a few times. She looked at us, as if we could help her. After a couple of minutes her eyes got watery, her head drooped, and she slowly plodded herself way away from us. I have not killed as much as n insect since that day. It still haunts me.”

The worst health scare in the Alaska wilderness of this reality show was the case of a young man who contracted trichinosis and it attacked major organs so severely that he was hours from death. His former 32-year-old heart resembled the heart of an 87-year-old. It took him months to recover from the damage to his organs and he suffered from debilitating congestive heart failure.

Watching these survivalists choke down roasted crickets, worms, and other bugs convinced me even more that the globalist plan to destroy our food sources and supply and replace them with farmed bugs in the name of saving the planet from an invented global warming is not for me.

 

The Forced Deconstruction of Reality

During Donald Trump’s entire presidency, the communist storm troopers fanned across the country, highly organized, and paid by wealthy elites with a slash and burn agenda, elites who suddenly developed a mentally deranged hatred for Donald Trump, their former friend.

These storm troopers, mostly young and white, created so much chaos that they made the country ungovernable and extremely violent. And nobody in power stopped them; police were defunded by Democrats and told to stand down and watch the burning, looting, and the killing of innocents. Democrat congressmen and women encouraged them publicly to engage in this violent chaos of “civil disobedience.”

Internationally, Donald Trump was the best president U.S. had in decades. Domestically, despite a good economy, the country was in social unrest and chaos mostly executed by paid Antifa and BLM thugs.

As soon as Joe Biden became president, the streets suddenly calmed, BLM and Antifa went underground, and the mass violence and burning of cities and poor neighborhoods stopped until the recent Democrat insurrection at the Tennessee Capitol.

The communist left, ignorant of history and the communist atrocities, is determined to change society fundamentally by any means necessary and they are succeeding on every domestic front except gun ownership. Once all private guns are confiscated, the communist coup will be complete.

The indoctrinated left and the rich white female voters were able to make good on the promise President Obama made before his first term commenced, “we are five days from fundamentally transforming” America. Patient America is in decline in ICU and almost comatose.

The transformation of America into a communist banana republic has been constant. Elites and their paid woke revolutionaries have forced a “violent deconstruction of reality” that we have never seen in the history of the United States. Every facet of human life has been altered and manipulated to cause the change they desired. Money is plentiful, the billionaire elites are giving generously to non-profits staffed by Millennials, Gen Z, and other brain-washed Americans with technological skills, judicial, and stock market manipulation knowledge. But banks are failing due to woke investments. Companies are turning their business models hard left to ESG (environmental social governance) and woke Marxist culture.

The fundamental transformation took place in education, medicine, economics, fossil fuels, transportation, family, military, etc. We are now “gender fluid,” we castrate children, we deride family, we kill babies in the womb as a human right, we are told to eat bugs and manufactured-in-the-lab garbage, we are forcibly vaccinated, vaccines are injected into our food supply, and we are told at every corner to hate each other based on the amount of melanin in our skin.

Men compete in women’s sports, use women’s bathrooms, disrobe in front of women in the locker rooms, pretend to menstruate, pretend to need tampons, and pretend to have babies. Gender dysphoria is no longer a mental illness, it is reality in 21^st century Biden’s America. And we are forced to buy into their delusional worlds or else. Reality, biology, and real science, not the consensus variety, no longer count.

The Millennials running Hollywood, television, and advertising are trying to obliterate the white race, by inventing the construct of “white supremacy,” “whiteness,” and “white guilt.” Watching commercials today is quite revealing. The white race has almost disappeared from ads.

A recent four-month observational study of television commercials revealed that, even though 72% of the population is white, white men are only present in ads as old, sickly, ugly, stupid, and inconsequential humans.

If white men have a speaking part, they are usually in a gay partnership. The white men are doing laundry and handing it to smart little girls. There are zero commercials of white fathers with their sons. White boys and teens have also disappeared from ads.

There are plenty of ads of white girls with a black brother and couples are white women with a black man or a white man with a black wife. Is this truly representative of America or is it programming Americans to become Orwell’s 1984? It is certainly part of the “violent deconstruction of reality.”

One ad featured a white young male who was so dumb that he could not pronounce the name of the company nor the lines he was supposed to say. Another one presented a white young male running into a barrier and falling into the ocean – the talking non-white female was watching in disbelief. One ad selling insurance featured a white male running alongside a car about to be washed and he jogs through the car wash with the car driven by a dismayed-looking black male.

Ads for cars feature women drivers, usually black women driving white men as passengers in the back seat. European cars, on the other hand, are featured on highways, the drivers are not seen. Is this the trend of the fake “diversity” and “inclusion?” Or is it something else?

According to the four-month observational study of ads, 84.3% of commercials had black men as protagonists even though there is only a 13% black population in this country. Black males comprise 7% of the population but they were represented in 79.7% of the ads. White males, if present in ads, were in the 60–80-year-old category, advertising debilitating illnesses, reverse mortgages, and Medicare.

Michael Savage asked in a recent podcast, “Who directs these commercials? Was it the federal government? Was it accidental? Is it the Pol Pot revolution? Are they demasculinizing the white male and teaching us to disappear the white race?”

The forced “deconstruction of reality” is no longer subtle, it is violent in so many ways. And there is not much, if anything at all, that we, as a nation, are doing to stop it.

 

 

 

Stafford Civil War Park

Opened in April 2013, the 41 acres of land throughout Stafford County, which had been camped on, traversed, fortified, and used by the 11^th Corps of the Union Army of the Potomac, has been compared to Valley Forge, Pa of the American Revolution.  

In 1863, over 135,000 Union Army soldiers established winter camps here after the Battle of Fredericksburg and the “Mud March” during which they suffered hundreds of desertions per night.

Spending the winter in the Stafford woods was not easy for the locals either, because the woods were decimated by hundreds of fires every night; the local population was outnumbered 15 to 1. Their farms were turned into army camps, homes became military headquarters or hospitals, and their woods disappeared rather quickly.

Union soldier morale was low especially after the terrible loss in the Battle of Chancellorsville. During the winter following the defeat, soldiers did their best to improve living conditions in the woods of Stafford County. By June 12, 1863, 160 years ago, the 11^th Corps of the Union Army of the Potomac, 1^st and 3^rd divisions moved North.

They left behind 3,500 graves of soldiers who died of exposure, disease, and other accidents. The deceased soldiers’ remains were moved to national cemeteries during 1866-1870. On this April day before Easter when we visited, temperatures were in the low 50s and the wind chill factor made the open fields and the woods so much colder.

The park preserves the remains of a winter camp, soldier-built and improved roads, a corduroy road, hut sites, chimneys, remains of a pre-Civil War bridge, an early Stafford quarry, and three large earthen artillery batteries built to defend the area. 11^th Corps Union soldiers moved to this area from Belle Plain and Stafford Courthouse in late February/early March 1863.

Soldiers wintered in tents, above ground in make-shift shelters, or in shelters dug below ground, taking advantage of the temperature insulating quality of the earth. Huts had fold-down bunks and were made of chinked logs, barrels, and even the occasional repurposed bricks. There is an intact sandstone hearth and large firebox. Sandstone was plentiful in the quarries. The huts resembled miniature cabins made of logs and topped with canvas or board roofs.

The museum displayed the letter of an 11^th Corps soldier to his parents in Germany. Sergeant Wilhelm Francksen, who immigrated in 1861 from Germany, had joined the Union Army. Badly wounded in the neck and his legs paralyzed in the Battle of Gettysburg, he was discharged from the Army in February 1864 and died in the 1870s.

In his letter to his father, dated March 1, 1863, from Stafford, Virginia, he described how they had marched 13 miles in 2 days, “drenched and frozen to the bone.” Setting up camp, they made coffee and ate crackers, hard bread, and salt pork. Huddled together to keep warm, soldiers woke up stiff on the frozen ground the next morning and surrounded by snow piled high on the linen tent.

In his awkward description to his dad, Sgt. Francksen of the 26^th Wisconsin Infantry Volunteers, wrote that the order came to make more permanent huts to stay warm. They cut down trees, dragging them through the woods, and built warmer shelters. They had to cook their own food and find water to do so.

“We were bustling around like ants in an anthill. A few days later a little town had grown out of this wasteland, consisting of good huts made from raw tree logs, with chimneys, a fireplace, and comfortable places to sleep.”

“The tree trunks were fit very skillfully together, the joints filled out with green moss, there was a porch in front of the hut with green fir, cedars, and wild laurel, with red berries with moss and colorful stones in front. Inside too, everything was very clean and tastefully furnished: a fireplace, seats, a little table, with the beds in the back, 2 bunk beds, each one for 2 men…”

Historical records dedicated a lot of time to Irish and African soldiers in the Civil War, but Germans were the largest ethnic group in federal service, enlisted in larger proportions to their overall population. In the Army of the Potomac, German immigrant-soldiers outnumbered Irish 2 to 1. They came mostly from New York, Pennsylvania, and some from Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Wisconsin.

“General Ludwig Blenker and his ‘German division’ were lauded for covering the Union retreat from Manassas.” After the Battle of Chancellorsville, where most of the 11^th Corps were German-speaking soldiers, under Major General Oliver Otis Howard, a West Point graduate from Maine, the German American soldiers became the scapegoats of the failed campaign after the 11^th Corps was flanked and decisively defeated by Stonewall Jackson’s veteran Confederate infantrymen.

The primary travel through the area was the Potomac Church Road dating from the 17^th century. The Union Army corduroyed sections of Potomac Church Road to enable troop and artillery movement and to protect and supply Union Army encampments.

When the soil is swampy, sandy, or loamy as in Stafford county, the roads must be corduroyed to allow troops and heavy equipment to march through. Good drainage and a foot or 18 inches above the natural surface insured that the road was passable with an army. Logs were covered with 6 inches of brush, and then with about 6 inches of almost any kind of earth over the brush.

Major-General Joseph Hooker ordered on February 15, 1863, that “the road from the Fitzhugh house (General Sickles’ headquarters) to the bridge across Potomac Creek, half a mile below the railroad bridge, thence to Stafford Courthouse, passing about a mile to the Westward of Brooke’s Station, be put in such condition as to be practicable for artillery at all times, corduroying it where necessary throughout its whole length; the corduroy material being of sufficient length, if possible to form a double-track roadway.”

The nearby sandstone quarry remains of the late 18^th and early 19^th century helped Stafford county’s progress. Archeological evidence showed that stone quarried here was loaded onto scows or shallow boats and floated down small tributaries to the larger and deeper Accokeek Creek.

Stone from nearby Government Island and other locations was used in the White House construction and U.S. Capitol. The quarry cutting operations were overseen by a Master Mason, usually a European. Skilled workers included stone cutters and stone carvers. Blacksmiths were needed to constantly sharpen the cutting tools.

Historians cannot exactly connect this quarry to the 1863 Union Army camp in Stafford. However, one encampment fire box, several chimneys remain, and one hearth used sandstone from nearby quarry sites.

Of the three Union Army batteries located in the Stafford Civil War Park, one of them is at 200 feet above sea level, the highest one, with a three-faced parapet which allowed it to support the other two batteries and encampments against attacks from multiple directions. “The steep approaches would have been cleared of trees in 1863 and, combined with its well-preserved 182’ of parapet and ditches, would have proven exceedingly difficult to attack from the Accokeek Valley.” It held four to five rifled guns.

The largest and strongest battery in the park had 300 linear feet of parapet, 30 feet thick. It indicates that heavy caliber rifled guns from the artillery reserve would have been used here.

 

 

 

 

 

American Socialism Roots and the Current Madness

One of the important vectors of the brand of socialist tyranny that developed into the type of equity/racism-based socialism we see in the United States today was the Industrial Revolution, an event that caused tremendous social and economic upheaval.

The American socialism promoted to us today used invented inflammatory constructs like “white supremacy,” “racism,” “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “transgenderism,” bending reality to multiple non-existent sexes. The lies extended to college-educated professionals who forgot how to define a woman and declared that men can have menses and give birth to babies.

The vectors used were the computer revolution and the unrestraint technocracy which censored all citizens and the media that did not buy into their irrational and perverse agenda. This technocracy was sold to us initially as convenience, social media platforms, entertainment, reach out to the world, and other innocuous-sounding developments.

The original Marxist Socialists arrived in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century from Germany among waves of European immigrants looking for a better economic life, political freedom, and freedom from religious oppression. They brought with them all the ideas and ideology that caused turmoil in Europe.

Joseph Weydemeyer (1818-1866), a friend of Marx and Engels, arrived in the U.S. in 1851. He proselytized their ideas in various German-language publications. A former artillery officer in the Prussian Army, he enlisted in the Union Army as a Captain and retired as a general. He “edited a Marxist publication in St. Louis until his death in 1866.”

Another German immigrant, Friedrich Sorge (1826-1906), was the leader of a communist club in New York City in 1857. He corresponded with Marx and, “when Marx established the world headquarters of the First International in New York City in 1872, he placed Sorge in charge.” Engels, unlike Marx, offered a lot of support and advice to communist cells in the U.S. and even visited U.S. in 1888.

The various socialist groups were embroiled in rivalries like those of the various socialists who had immigrated to the United States from Europe: the Marxists who believed in trade unions’ activity to reach economic goals, and the Lasallians who wanted “independent political activity” to achieve their economic goals.

From the various socialist factions’ fight emerged the Socialist Labor party in 1877, the Socialist party in 1901, and the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) in 1905. The political influence of the American socialists as a protest movement reached its “peak” in 1912 when “more than 1,000 Socialists held elective public office, largely at the municipal level.”

It is not surprising in the 21^st century that the socialist globalist movement of U.N. Agenda 21/2030 started at the local level with ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives).  To escape the negative influence of its original name, ICLEI is now calling itself Local Governments for Sustainability, still using the same local plans and the global warming Armageddon as an excuse to rob the global populace of its wealth and private property and redistribute it to whomever they decide.

Initially, Socialism did not get as far as intended because the federal government established the Department of Labor in 1913, minimum wage laws, industrial safety regulations, workmen compensation benefits, and other work-related protections for the labor force. That rendered socialism temporarily obsolete until they developed new plans and ideas to take over the minds and indoctrinate millions into its absurd ideology.

In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution began a reign of terror in Russia. Their communism (Marxism-Leninism) was the “revolutionary, materialistic ideology used by its adherents to justify their efforts to seize power by and all means for the forcible establishment of a world-wide totalitarian social order.”

Historians called the year 1917 the birth of “Lenin’s creed of violence.” It was a “creed of force and violence” which spread quickly around the world to other countries. The new adherents to communism were not allowed to search for truth, they were indoctrinated and forced to believe in communism’s debunked “scientific” principles, in its faulty ideology which interpreted nature, history, and society on false premises. The communist society was never opened to questions or criticism by anyone who had divergent opinions. If they dared, they were thrown in gulags.

The communist tyranny and subsequent imperialism can be best described through its terror, lies, intolerance, abuses of power, brutality, and as Khrushchev denounced the dictator Stalin, the “cult of personality.” The Cultural Revolution was extremely bloody and entire generations were destroyed by the drivel of communist indoctrination. Violent young people murdered total strangers whom they believe to be a threat to their ideology, sent to gulags innocent people, killed their own relatives and sometimes their own parents to please their communist handlers and rulers.

By contrast, William Tyler Page, a descendant of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, wrote “The American Creed” in 1917, which was accepted on April 3, 1918, by the U.S. House of Representatives on behalf of the American people:

“I believe in the United States of America as a Government of the people, by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a Republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect Union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.”

President Obama told an adoring and cheering crowd in 2009 that we were “five days from the fundamental transformation of America.” That fundamental transformation of America is here and, in the fourteen years since that speech, America is on the Marxism path to change our western culture beyond the point of no return, ruled by a Marxist cadre that has attacked and successfully transformed the family, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, religion, the legal and justice systems, and biological reality.

If one uses the term “cultural Marxism,” he/she is immediately attacked by the left as a conspiracy theorist. Reality proves that public school education and especially higher education have become the breeding grounds for Marxists, the mentally disturbed, the psychotics, and the sexual deviants bent on changing our culture to their global Marxist agenda. Universities are no longer a place of learning and healthy debate; they are Marxist indoctrination centers.

Riley Gaines, a college swimmer, spoke on the campus of a California college in support of restoring women’s sports to biological women, and the trans-students physically attacked her despite campus police protection. Marxist students are getting more and more aggressive thanks to universities that are supporting them and their reality-denying agenda entirely.

The socialists and Marxists in power in Congress today are not afraid to advocate their support to and membership in socialist/Marxist organizations and do everything in their power to undermine our Constitutional Republic and to punish economically and politically half of the American people who did not vote for them. 

Confederate Disaster

On the night of May 2, 1863, the thick forest in Chancellorsville we are standing in, witnessed a major disaster and loss. 

Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson was returning from a reconnaissance with a party of soldiers down the Mountain Road. Confederate muskets fired from south of Plank Road (Route 3) across Jackson’s path. The archives state that a Confederate officer yelled, “Cease firing! You are firing into your own men!” But, in the darkness and confusion, a voice shouted back, “Who gave that order? It’s a lie! Pour it into them, boys!” The darkness was briefly illuminated by the flash from many rifles. Three bullets found their mark, all three for Gen. Jackson. Two bullets hit Jackson’s left arm and the third pierced his right hand.

Later in the night, Gen. Jackson’s left arm would be amputated. On May 10, 1863, Gen. Jackson passed away in the farm office at Guinea Station.

Gen. Jackson’s horse panicked and bolted for the woods, but officers stopped the animal and lowered Jackson to the ground on the very spot we are standing in. Gen. Jackson was carried to a field hospital behind the lines where 27-year-old Dr. Hunter McGuire, the medical director of the Jackson’s corps, amputated his left arm just below the shoulder where one bullet had entered his arm, splintering his humerus to the elbow. The entire operation took place in a tented field hospital near Wilderness Tavern, about 4.5 miles west from the place where Jackson was wounded.

The surgical kit with which Dr. McGuire operated on Gen. Jackson is displayed in the museum. Dr. Hunter McGuire was a very tall young man, 6’4,’’ who towered over Gen. Jackson. According to the museum archives, despite the thousands of procedures performed by Dr. McGuire during his career, none was more famous or scrutinized than the amputation of Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson’s arm in the morning hours of May 3, 1863. He died apparently from pneumonia, which he acquired while being transported from the field hospital to a more secure location. His arm and body are buried separately.

The famous surgeon who amputated his arm

The forest where Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson was felled by the friendly fire

Fredericksburg Flowers

Nurse Woolsey

The verdant fields of Chancellorsville, Virginia, are bursting with wildflowers. The yellows, purple, lavender, white, and pink are delight in the blazing spring sun. It is a humbling experience to walk through the grounds where so many Americans have lost their lives in a Civil War battle won at such great cost, a Confederate pyrrhic victory of sorts, brother fighting against brother. How many cries of agony of the injured or dying soldiers were heard through the gun smoked air and how much innocent blood soaked into the fields surrounding us?

The wildflowers are beautiful every spring and bring to mind the Fredericksburg Flowers. Despite the Civil War doom and gloom, nature sprang to life that spring and with it, its colorful wild flowers. A relief nursing worker from New York, Georgeanna Woolsey, picked wild flowers for a new regiment heading to the front.

“We filled our baskets, trays, and the skirts of our gowns with snow-balls, lemon blossoms, and roses yellow, white, and red. The 8^th New York Heavy Artillery was in the column . . . and [we] tossed roses and snowballs in showers over the men. They were delighted . . . . ‘Oh, give me one . . . . I will carry it into the fight for you;’ and another cheerily, -- ‘I will bring it back again.’”

One such happy New York soldier brought the flowers back as promised – he returned three days later to Miss Woolsey as a corpse, wilted Fredericksburg flowers upon his chest.

Communist Imperialism and Woke Society

According to historical record, following World War II, seven countries in Europe were seized by “communist imperialism.” Using Bolshevik apparatchiks sent from the Soviet Union, these nations copied the political, economic, and social life of the Soviet Union and became “people’s democracies,” known to the free world as Soviet satellites. Ordinary people, who had been completely deceived, had no idea at the time what these “democracies” would become and how they would fundamentally transform the peoples’ lives for the worse, much worse.

The “communist imperialist” expansion was enabled by the presence of Red Army agents who supported and paid for terrorist and subversive actions carried out by local communists. Well-organized communist cells were led by locals who had spent time in the Soviet Union in Kremlin’s schools between WWI and WWII. The Soviet-trained propagandists were well ensconced in local life like parasitic insects.

Matyas Rakosi, Hungarian communist leader, explained how the communists seized power, by using a two-word descriptor, ‘salami tactics.’ The well-organized communists funded by the Soviets and British and American bankers, “gradually sliced away at other political groups until, finally, all opposition was eliminated.”

Here is a list of communist methods used by local communists with the help of the Red Army operatives, as described by J. Edgar Hoover.

1.      Non-communist political parties were forcibly incorporated in coalitions dominated by communists.

2.      Non-communist leaders were arrested, imprisoned, refused permission to return from abroad, or were deported.

3.      Non-communist press was censored.

4.      Non-communist parties were infiltrated and disrupted from within.

5.      Communists took control of key ministries such as Interior, Justice, and Communications.

6.      Communists gained authority over policing, justice, and the media.

7.      All elections were rigged.

8.      Making the country ungovernable through civil unrest, riots, strikes, and well-organized protests and demonstrations.

The communist imperialist doctrine is described by three concepts:

1.      Communism has a philosophy, and it is materialistic.

2.      Communism is based on a method called dialectic.

3.      Communism applies materialistic philosophy and this dialectic method to all social developments and to history.

The communist materialistic philosophy is based on the communist belief that only matter exists; there is no spiritual being. There is no Supreme Being, no God who created the universe.

Humans have no spiritual soul which is immortal, and humans are the same as any other form of life. Man is chemistry, physics, and is highly developed when compared to other forms of life. Primitive man, communists say, have invented the supreme being to explain natural phenomenon such as lightning, earthquakes, mud slides, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, acidic lakes, and tsunamis.

All religions and their moral codes based on spiritual beliefs are thus fantasy, or as Karl Marx said, “religion is the opium of the masses,” translated as “religion is the opiate of the masses.”

The dialectic method refers to the art of discourse, reasoning, and debate. Dialectic comes from the Greek word dialektike. Dialectics in antiquity was the art of arriving at truth through the clash of opposing views and arguments. By debating, opponents underlined the contradictions in each other’s arguments to find a conclusion that contained the truth and eliminated the faults in each opinion.

This dialectic method of debate had three parts: the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. The synthesis combined the best elements of the thesis and of the antithesis. Once the synthesis was produced, it became a new thesis. This new thesis was then developed, the antithesis, and then a new synthesis sprung up.

Karl Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism was influenced by the German philosopher Hegel.  In his idealism, Hegel believed that the universe was both rational and spiritual. Marx used Hegel’s dialectical method to validate his materialistic philosophy. But Hegel’s philosophy was idealistic.

Hegel used the dialectical method to understand the past and the present. Marx used the dialectical method to explain the past, the present, and the future of society.

Marx and Engels helped the communists develop their three laws:

1.      The law of the unity and struggle of opposites – “contradiction in all matter which drives it to further development” (communists used examples such as protons and electrons, cells forming and dying, and opposing classes in society)

2.      The law of negation (communists explained that slavery was negated by feudalism, feudalism was negated by capitalism which will be negated by communism – all things obsolete will be negated and replaced by the good in the dialectical process)

3.      The law of the sudden leap (communists explained that quantitative changes produce qualitative changes; the emergence of qualitative changes will require a sudden leap; in societal order, the qualitative changes require revolution as a sudden leap)

Communists explained history as a materialistic process driven by the class struggle. The Communist Manifesto stated, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This is historical materialism, communists applying their theory of dialectical materialism to the history of mankind. In Marx’ and Engels’ opinion, “the first law of existence is self-preservation.” Since self-preservation involves the “production of the necessities of life, they concluded that the means of production constituted the fundamental force in history.”

Communists indoctrinated us in schools with their surplus value theory to demonstrate how superior the communist economy was when compared to capitalism. Marx claimed that the value of any commodity is the amount of labor required to produce it - that is called the labor theory of value.

The fallacy of the labor theory of value is that in reality, the value of a good depends not just on labor but on other variables such as the economic value and actual cost of the inputs used to produce a good, how much the industry can produce at any given time, how much can be distributed, how much is actually demanded, the scarcity of a good, and how much consumers are willing to pay for any good or service.

Marx’s theory also did not take into account investment in capital, management’s ability, technology used in the production process which was derived from the talent and skills of a few. Marx would be unable to explain why producing a Ferrari, which requires many months to build and a lot of labor, sells for much less than the most expensive painting auctioned off, a painting that perhaps required less man-hours to produce.

Labor alone does not produce value.  Marx believed that “those who labor do not receive full payment for the value of the goods their labor produces, and the capitalists keep the ‘surplus value’ for themselves as profit.” Marx went as far as saying that the ‘surplus value’ was “stolen from the workers.”

Any student graduating from a communist school would have sat many hours in class, year after year, with eyes glazed over, listening to lessons on Scientific Socialism and Scientific Communism. Communists claim that their ideology is scientific, a “science of history.” But that is not true. There is nothing scientific about communism, including their ineffective and often terrible economic five-year central planning.

The concocted theory of historical materialism was made during the Industrial Revolution when there “were great social inequities with marked differences in economic classes.”

Other societies would invalidate Marx and Engels’ theory of historical materialism and its five stages of societal development: primitive-communal society, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, communism. For example, in Asian societies the despotic state owned the means of production. There was no private ownership of the means of production. An Asian despotic society had two classes, the all-powerful state, and the masses. The masses had no power, yet the Asian society did not go through feudalism, nor did it go through a class revolution.

Communists suppressed references to Asian cultures because they did not fit neatly into the narrative of the five stages of historical materialistic development. If they had, the masses would have realized that their communist societal order was very much like the Asian despotic society – the bureaucratic state in power (the communists) and the masses (the proletariat).

In their simplistic theory, communists have failed to acknowledge the inconvenient reality that history is influenced by many factors. Economic development is not the sole influencer of history.

Communists failed to recognize the influence of famous and infamous people, patriotism, justice, public service, personal power, religious beliefs, the Crusades, love, ideals, traditions, the search for truth and justice, as important factors in shaping history. History is not just a string of economic developments. There are natural disasters that have influenced history, epidemics like the Black Plague, minor incidents and even chance, like the violent storm that destroyed the Spanish Armada.

As J. Edgar Hoover wrote, “Despite communist claims, the laws of natural science cannot be applied to social science. History and sociology can never be exact sciences like chemistry and physics. Scientific laws must have universal application. Historical materialism falls far short of this requirement.”

Someone attempted to relate Hegelian dialectic to today’s history. The elites and politicians create a problem, expecting a reaction from the public and conditioning the public to ask for change before the problem becomes a crisis. Now that the public is asking for change to solve the problem the elites caused, the elites propose their agenda as a solution to the problem.

When the solution does not fix the problem, it becomes the basis for a new problem because the situation has gotten worse. When this reaches the boiling point, people demand change again. The process repeats over and over until society is moved to whatever end point the elites had in mind.

Communists said that when society is no longer divided into adversarial classes, the dialectic materialism will no longer occupy man’s social development; in other words, man will be satisfied, and his struggles will be over.

But where will man work, who will work to produce anything, and what will satisfy man’s needs? Will each person alive be allowed to determine his/her own abilities and needs in life according to the communist mantra, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs?” That should be interesting as humans tend to be selfish and greedy. What a pie in the sky woke dream when everything will be free and provided for, and, as Danish MP Ida Auken wrote in her 2016 essay, you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”