Power and Control

There is no doubt that power and control over millions of other human beings provide those at the top, the cabal of globalists, with immense feelings of intoxication, a god-like power.  

The quest for this all-consuming power has created social, political, and economic upheaval across the centuries. And billions of innocents paid the ultimate price for wars, famine, pestilence, and poverty caused by men with aspirations to control as much land as possible and humanity in general.

The quest for power and control exploded with the Industrial Revolution which eventually had a deep effect on many countries in the twentieth century: socialism, revolutions, bolshevism, communism, fascism, and many other isms that are still plaguing the globe in the twenty-first century.

America’s initial incursion into communism started with the arrival of the first Marxists/Socialists from Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. More European immigrants brought with them the ideas and theories of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876).

Joseph Weydemeyer (1818-1866), a friend of Marx and Engels, came to this country in 1851; a former artillery officer in the Prussian army, he enlisted in the Union Army as a captain and retired as a general. After the Civil War, he edited a Marxist newspaper in St. Louis in which Marx’s and Engel’s ideas were published for German immigrants.

Another German immigrant, Friedrich Sorge (1826-1906), was also a pioneer of Marxism in America. He organized a communist club in New York City in 1857. He led the American branch of the First International. 

Communism has a long history in New York City. Marx established the world headquarters of the First International there in 1872 and placed Sorge in charge. 

The year 1917 marked the entry of the United States into World War I. For communists, however, 1917 represented something else entirely.

The communists seized power in Russia in 1917 during the “Great October Socialist Revolution.” According to the Gregorian calendar, the date was November 7, 1917. However, according to the Julian calendar used by the Russians, the revolution took place on October 25, 1917, hence the term “October Revolution.”

According to J.E. Hoover, the “Great October Socialist Revolution” was actually two events in Russia in 1917:

1.     The first event was the overthrow of the czarist regime in March 1917 and its replacement with a Provisional Government.

2.     The second event was the actual communist seizure of power on November 7 when the Russian people’s temporary freedom ended. The czarist power and control were replaced by the communist power and control.

Power and control exercised by a few egotistical mad men fills historical pages with bloody treachery, deceit, individual and mass terrorism, broken treaties, infiltrations, subversions, guerilla warfare, sabotage, wars, torture, genocide, repression of minorities, purges, assassinations, slave-labor camps, prisons, concentration camps, religious suppression and persecution, abrogation of individual liberties, and the ultimate goal to communize the planet under one government.

Military terms seem to abound in the communist tactics of power and control, i.e., “mobilize the masses,” “advance detachment of the proletariat,” “storm the fortress of capitalism,” “in the front ranks of the struggle,” and “shifts in the ranks.”  They are clever wordsmiths, replacing reality with euphemisms and meaningless slogans of deceit. They train ideologically and militarily an elite corps of “professional revolutionaries” in order to influence mass support of non-communists.

Communists use front groups and organizations to disseminate their propaganda through newspapers, magazines, schools, universities, Hollywood, and mass media.

They form bonds and temporary coalitions with other political organizations while pretending to work in the interest of the majority of the population. 

The most insidious action is sponsoring as many candidates as possible for election to public office at all levels. And they have deep pockets filled by donations from billionaires who share the same communist ideology.

The communists’ religion is atheism. To Marx and Lenin, organized religion was “the opium of the people.”  Lenin mocked religion as a “kind of spiritual gin in which the slaves of capital drown their human shape and their claims to any decent human life.”

The Bolshevik’s “proletarian” revolution was “actually an armed insurrection by a small group against an almost powerless government.”  

Interestingly, not all communist coups were armed insurrections, some coups occurred in the voting booths through massive cheating and deception.  

Others took power and control through misleading and false promises of “Bread, Peace, and Freedom!” The communists’ idea of liberty was the establishment of a police state based on naked force and terror. And they succeeded in many Soviet-controlled countries, ushering in initially the “era of socialism.”

At the end of the socialist era, terror and lies transformed into communist tyranny. When tanks rolled in and crushed any workers’ demonstrations against the regime, their power and control became absolute. At that point, communism converted into a campaign of terror waged against the people, with total disregard for moral and religious values and utter contempt for the cost in human life and individual freedoms. 

Nothing lasts forever, eventually all that is left is dust and rust. The men at the top who destroy so many lives and societies with their dangerous ideologies and power, are long gone by the time subsequent generations suffer the consequences of their actions.

 

 

 

Masters of Indoctrination, Manipulation, and Agitation

Bread line

Communists are masters of agitation, manipulation, infiltration, and indoctrination. Just ask millions of people who have survived and fled from socialist republics ruled by the Communist Party.

Starting with the Bolsheviks, the communists perfected that art of infiltrating schools, colleges, labor unions, community groups, civic groups, NGOs, the government, churches, professional, social, and economic organizations. Their goal has always been to subvert all institutions but particularly minority groups and ethnic groups.

The communists adapted their propaganda to the fears, prejudices, real or invented problems, and social grievances that blame society at large for a minority group’s problems.

Communists are masters at exploiting frictions and differences between native-born and foreign born, whites and non-whites, Jews and Muslims, Christians and atheists, rich and poor, all with the ultimate agenda of aligning the divergent groups with the communist ideology of the collective.

The communist agitators have no real interest in helping the poor, non-whites, or any other “aggrieved” group which claims to experience friction in society, they are only interested in exploiting them for personal gain by magnifying the alleged, newly invented grievances.

The BLM organization agitated young crowds to destroy, loot, and burn cities in the name of “black lives matter,” and, after collecting millions of dollars for this new cause, the BLM masters took the money and ran to buy themselves gated mansions, yachts, and other luxury goods, doing nothing for the alleged oppressed. It was all deception and fraud. They used the “black lives matter” riots to gain wealth for themselves and to advance the cause of American communism.

NGOs have promoted riots, burning and looting, using the communist argument of “class struggle” to their advantage. They injected the idealist and jobless, mostly white crowds into racial issues, exploiting them, promoting hatred for law and order (defunding the police), creating domestic civil unrest and division, fomenting racial strife, hatred, and violence.

Over time, I have heard the phrase that communism is “the wave of the future” and “the future belongs to the youth.” Those are transparent and impossible lies.

College students, the naïve humans that they are, credulous and idealistic, are buying those phrases and the impossible dreams that they engender. By the time these idealistic young men and women find jobs and become gainfully employed, tax-paying citizens, with children and bills to pay, the reality of communism will hit them hard in the wallet.

Students are idealistic and believe that they are making the world a better place through their activism. Who can resist the dream of world peace? To this end, they are the easiest to fool and mobilize, the preferred useful idiots of communist professors and other apparatchiks.

As someone wise once said, young minds are pliable and fertile, the “soil in which the communists hope to implant the alien seed of Marxism.”

The communist activists cleverly use students and their naiveté, convincing them to destroy the democratic processes of government. They think that the erasure of institutions that have built our nation into a successful country will create a “tabula rasa” (clean slate) onto which communism can inscribe its oppressive footprint. They promise so much free stuff to new converts that the attraction becomes magical. But economics teaches us that nothing is free, someone must pay for it.

American students do not know this because they are no longer taught how to think logically, they are taught what to think. Since the history of communism is not studied in American schools, students have no idea that the communism they think they want is a “materialistic, godless dogma dedicated to world domination.”

The extensive outreach of college professors who indoctrinate students in their classes has convinced young, impressionable minds that communism is superior to a free government.

As the current government is working increasingly against the people, one wonders if there is a free government anymore, accountable to ‘we the people’ and how soon the leaders of tomorrow, the current pliable and naïve students, will be subservient to the metastasized government. At that point, they wished they could reverse it peacefully.

 

The Rus and How Russia Got Its Name

The Vikings, sailing in their strong and narrow ships, built so tough that were able to withstand rough seas, reached amazing parts of the world such as Newfoundland via Iceland and Greenland, and may have discovered America before Christopher Columbus. Their raids reached around today’s France, Spain, Italy, the southern part of the Mediterranean, England, Ireland, Germany, the Nordic countries, all the way to Kiev and the Caspian Sea.

They were searching for land more fertile than the soil in Scandinavia. They used Europe’s rivers such as the Rhine and the Volga and their tributaries to reach unsuspected communities which they raided with the intent to carry the loot and trade with other Vikings.

The red haired and bearded Viking raiders started plundering Europe’s villages at the end of the eighth century and by the tenth century the raids ended, and the Vikings became colonists.

Normandy was granted to them in 911 A.D. and they adopted the French language and their religion. The Duke of Normandy became a powerful ruler of Europe and his Christian soldiers conquered all of England in 1066, then southern Italy and Sicily.

Norwegians, without maps and compasses and with 50-70 feet long boats, founded in the deserted Iceland a land of farmers and fishermen in which all free men could speak and vote, the first democracy since Greece.

Erik the Red found Greenland. His son Leif found a land which he called Vinland, Newfoundland. He tried to colonize it but failed.

A grave of a Viking raider/trader found in eastern Sweden in a town called Fittja, was evidence to the reach of the Viking explorations; it contained silver pieces from Cordoba, Spain, Egypt and Syria, Baghdad, and the city of Tashkent in Central Asia, today’s capital of Uzbekistan.

The Viking raids’ destinations were churches and monasteries where they knew that Christians kept incredible valuables made of gold, silver, and precious gems. In the process of raiding, the Vikings destroyed and burned to the ground many churches and monasteries.

The plundering Dane named Rorik, after sacking the port of Dorestad, at the mouth of the River Rhine, decided to settle there and became a prosperous merchant. Others formed trading posts far away which grew into cities like Dublin and Kiev. There was already a flourishing Scandinavian trade in furs, cattle, dairy, and Baltic amber during the Roman times.

The Vikings were vigorous warriors, aggressive, enterprising, willing to take risks, and did not fear death. Valhalla was heaven and final destination.

Ibn Faldan, the Arab ambassador from the Caliphate of Baghdad, wrote on a mission to the “Rus,” the Vikings of the East, in 922 A.D.:

“Never have I seen people of more perfect physique; they are tall as date palms and reddish in color. They are the filthiest of God’s creatures. They do not wash after discharging their natural functions, neither do they wash their hands after meals. They are as stray donkeys. . . . Ten or twenty of them may live together in one house, and each man has a couch of his own . . ..”

Ibn Faldan described how a slave girl brings her master a huge bowl of water in which he washed his face, hands, and hair, blew his nose and spit into the water. Then the bowl was carried to his neighbor who followed the same ritual until the same bowl was carried around to the entire household.

Faldan wrote about the Viking chief’s burial ritual in an ornate boat decorated with silk brocades; how an old woman named the Angel of Death stabbed a young slave-woman who “volunteered” to die with her master; the Viking men banged on their shields to drown out the cries of the slave while the ship, the dead chief, and his young and unwilling slave were set on fire for his fleeting trip to Valhalla.

The geographer Ibn Rusteh, another Arab traveler, wrote about thirty years later that the Vikings wore “exquisite clothes, respect their guests, are hospitable and friendly to strangers.” They stick together in battle as one until victory but are very quarrelsome, wrote Rusteh. Both writers agreed that the Vikings demanded too much tribute from Slav villages.

The Vikings were called the Rus by their Finnish neighbors. According to the twelfth century Russian Chronicle, the Rus were invited by the Slavs in the ninth century to rule their land because “Our land is rich, but there is no order in it. Come rule over us.”

Rurik, his brothers, and their descendants accepted the Slavs’ offer and established Novgorod, Smolesnk, and Kiev, which they stated to be the “mother of Russian cities.” Kiev became the “early capital of this Slavic land now ruled by the Rus and soon to be known as Rus or in English, Russia.” (Quest for the Past)

The Viking savages, as the Arabs wrote, were civilized by contact with the Byzantine world (today’s Istanbul). Prince Vladimir converted in 987 to Eastern Christianity and married the Byzantine Emperor’s sister. She was not too happy about the marriage and tried everything in her power to prevent it but was unsuccessful. Vladimir is said to have had hundreds of paramours.

Scholars believe that, by the end of the tenth century, the Viking blood in Russian society had diluted, which explained the Slavic name Vladimir. Historians agree that the mixture of Vikings and Slavs resulted in the first Russian state.

In 907 A.D., a Viking fleet commanded by the Swedish ruler of Kiev, Oleg, attacked the Byzantine Empire, according to the Russian Chronicle, by bringing his boats on land with wheels fitted on them. The ships, with spread sails pushed by the wind, rolled onto the city and the overwhelmed Byzantines had to beg for peace because the Byzantine Emperor and his army were away. Oleg’s son, Igor, tried the same trick in 942 A.D. but failed miserably when his fleet was destroyed.

 The Vikings maneuvered their slender boats swiftly up rivers, estuaries, “sailing around headlands, bringing fire, rape, and pillage inland.” In 793 A.D. they sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne (northeastern coast of England), the monks were slaughtered, and the holy treasures stolen.

St. Bertin Abbey’s annals in Rouen, France, describe “Danish pirates” in 841 A.D. “carrying everywhere a fury of rapine, fire, and sword.”

In 885 A.D. the Danes destroyed Paris. On horse and on foot, running through fields and hills, killing babies, children, young men, old men, fathers, sons, and mothers . . .. They ravage, they despoil, they destroy, they burn. . ..” They took no prisoners.

Records are scant and they come from third parties such as Arab travelers and religious people some of whom had been robbed. The Vikings do not have written accounts, but they do have Icelandic Sagas.

Archeologists depend heavily on findings from Viking tombs and unearthed homes and villages. Full armors for the head and torso have not survived but a famous warrior’s helmet dated from the seventh century was found in Sweden. Five other partial helmets survive from the Viking Age. Thick leather protected other parts of the body and the warriors carried a shield, an ax, or a heavy sword.

For Your Own Safety

As I watched the armed soldiers of the National Guard patrol the New York City’s subway system, soldiers that could demand to rifle through someone’s purse or backpacks, for their own safety, mind you, I am reminded of the fact that New Yorkers strongly believe in gun control and have demanded that the police be defunded. Now that crime is escalating to a seeming point of no return, New Yorkers are changing their tunes and want more police protection.

New Yorkers are willing to give their freedom to armed soldiers, for their own protection. Is this another resigned submission to molestation, just like passengers have given up all their freedoms and rights to the TSA in order to board a plane? It is sad to see TSA employees groping children, handicapped people, and grandmas with walkers and canes for “their own safety.”

A friend who has not flown for many years until recently and had no idea how extensive the TSA body searches were, was outraged and felt violated when the TSA agents touched all her private parts. When she protested, she was told repeatedly that it was for her own safety. When this 70-year-old grandma’s protests almost got her arrested for no reason other than asking questions, she complied to the invasive groping.

I grew up under communism with armed soldiers and armed police surrounding us everywhere we went. We were never molested publicly like Americans are at airports but we had to show the content of our purses upon exiting grocery stores.  Clothing stores were exempted, I assumed because we could never reach them, they were placed behind counters.

It was ridiculous that women had to show the contents of their purses for three reasons. Few women owned purses, they were small, and could barely hold anything other than a handkerchief. Additionally, grocery stores also stored food behind tall counters and food was only given to customers after they paid for their purchases and showed the clerk their receipt.  If you did not have a receipt stamped “paid,” then no merchandise was given to you.

If you exited the store with your purse, that meant that you purchased nothing. Shopping bags were made of durable jute string and expanded into a larger fishing net with handles in which all women carried shopping items.

In clothing stores, there were no dressing rooms, so it was impossible to steal anything by walking out with it. You had to know your exact size, make sure of what you wanted to purchase because, once in your possession, it was yours to keep and was never returnable even if it did not fit or was damaged.

When the police checked our identification passes (papers, please) and purses, they exercised their power to humiliate, harass, and oppress us at will, showing us that the commies were in control, and we had no choice but to comply and obey.

Theft actually occurred in two places: a. at work and b. in people’s homes.

In order to survive the equally small wages paid to everyone by the police state, regardless of education and training, (we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us) people took bribes and stole items from their work and bartered them with others for things they needed or sold them on the black market in order to earn additional money.  

Doctors and medical personnel accepted bribes to give some patients priority, quicker, or better service. The bribes came in the form of hard-to-find food, toiletries, cosmetics, soaps, needed medicines such as aspirin or cortisone shots, and an envelope with money called “walking around money.”  

If you did not have walking around money, you wasted your time going to see the socialist medicine doctor because you would wait forever. They would put you in the hospital, but they had no resources to treat you with or test you with. You got a chicken wire metal frame bed, a stained mattress, you had to bring your own sheets and towels and you had to wait in the 20-bed ward for days before a resident might see you.

Factory workers stole parts or finished products, traded services for others, stole bottles of wine to trade for sugar, cooking oil, rice, or meat; if they were truckers, siphoned milk or gasoline out of their big delivery trucks and bartered their loot with others. When someone was caught stealing, everyone who bought things or traded with him/her paid a fine or went to jail.

Even some family members stole from each other sometimes. Those in the country who had more and better food, were jealous of those who lived in the city and had a bathtub and indoor plumbing but empty pantries and starving.

The envy was real even though cold water was cut off sometimes all day, and, if we were lucky, hot water flowed two hours a day, usually when people were asleep.  

But the biggest thieves were the Communist Party high ranking members and their lackeys who confiscated the land, homes, savings, and wealth from citizens they deemed bourgeois, after throwing them in prison. Their only crimes were that they had accumulated wealth through hard work and did not subscribe to the Marxist ideology. People I knew and one great-uncle spent long years in prison for being anti-communists. One friend was sentenced to 17 years in a lead mine labor camp for inheriting from his parents a small hotel in a mountain resort.

Many people like my dad would not take anything from work that he had not earned and paid for.  He was a very hard-working, honorable, and honest man who deserved a much better life than the miserable existence and struggle under the communist oppression that ended his life much too early.

 

Disinformation, Malinformation, Misinformation

Before disinformation, malinformation, and misinformation become crimes, deemed so not just by the social media platform controllers and their fake fact checkers but by government dictates, it is important to understand what they mean.

Misinformation is defined as wrong or false information, not spread with intent, someone misremembering or misquoting. The person who disseminates misinformation believes it to be true.

Disinformation is the false information deliberately publicized by a government for political subversion; deliberately misleading or biased information, manipulated narrative or facts, and propaganda.

Malinformation is information that is based on truth but spread with intent to harm a person, an organization, or country; it is revealing confidential information to the public without a person’s agreement, changing the context, date, or time of an event; malinformation is exaggerated or purposefully misleading.

Ion Mihai Pacepa wrote about Disinformation in his book by the same title. The Lt. Gen. was the head of the intelligence service of a communist dictator, and the highest ranked defector to the U.S.

Disinformation was especially important in the former Soviet empire and those tasked with Dezinformatsiya used “framing,” rewriting history, manipulating records, documents, to bring about a desired outcome by the ruling government. Examples include press leaks to destroy the reputation of a national or religious leader, to destroy Christianity, to spread anti-Semitism, and create hate against opponents of Marxism.

One example is the 1960s play The Deputy which trashed the reputation of Pope Pius XII as an anti-Semite. Doctored photographs and deceptive editing were used to accomplish this goal.

According to Pacepa, there were more agents working on dezinformatsiya in the Soviet Bloc than there were people in the armed forces and the defense industry. One of Pacepa’s chapters is titled, “Disinformation under every rock.”

He talks about the play The Deputy and all the producers and actors involved. It ran for six months in Paris, then the play was brought to Broadway by Herman Shumlin, its American producer and active communist; he received a Tony award in 1964 for The Deputy.

The record of Pope Pius XII was never cleared even though the evidence suggested that he was not an anti-Semite. After the play The Deputy, the film Amen was produced in 2002 by the screenwriter Jorge Semprun, the “former member of the Spanish Communist Party’s Politburo” who had translated the play into French.

Nikita Khrushchev was an expert in dezinformatsiya, he rose to power in Kremlin by “changing the past of Lavrenty Beriya, his main rival for the Soviet throne.” (p. 111)

He was so successful with Beriya, changing his image from a “ferocious anti-imperialist to imperialist agent,” that Khrushchev used the same method to destroy Pope Pius XII’s image. The Pope was already dead and could not defend himself when dezinformatsiya portrayed him as a Jewish hater instead of the Jewish defender he was.

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns was deployed on the people of South America - the black liberation theology which “exported communism to the American continent.” Black liberation theology in the U.S. “explicitly stated their preference for Marxism.”

This disinformation theology incited Latin America’s poor to rebel against the fake “institutionalized violence of poverty generated by the United States.” Among these KGB-driven “liberation” movements were the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the National Liberation Army of Colombia (FARC), and the National Liberation Army of Bolivia. (p. 106)

In the 1960s, the disinformation icon of the black liberation theology movement, with his revolutionary beret with a star on it, was Che Guevara, now the darling of the American left college crowd.

Fidel Castro used the mugshot of Che to export his communist ideology. Che had already been executed in Bolivia for his crimes. Castro’s disinformation campaign turned him into “a martyr of American imperialism.” A four-hour movie about Che was made in 2009 which put this sadistic killer into the light of a martyr. (p. 110)

Disinformation is constantly used in history classes in public schools and universities. Since the 1980s, history textbooks such as Howard Zinn’s express the woke ideology of today. People’s reputations and jobs are destroyed if they refuse to adopt the woke ideology. Christianity and Christians have been targeted for purposeful defamation.

Soviet agents fanned the flames of disinformation in the Arab world, promoting terror in the region. The results are constant wars and terrorist attacks in the Middle East, with help from our own misguided politicians.

The word “duck” in Russian is not just a duck, it can also refer to disinformation. When the mainstream media is publishing and promoting disinformation, then “the ducks are flying.”

The “ducks are flying” daily in America; there are six corporations that own the mainstream media, and they are broadcasting constant disinformation for the gullible American public.

One of the main disinformation messages produced daily by the MSM is that America, the leader of the Free World, cannot be vulnerable to the virus of Marxism, thus lulling Americans into a false sense of security.

Our enemies are crushing our borders by the millions, vying for the welfare handouts. Why is this regime letting them in, aiding and abetting them? Because, as the regime tells us, “illegal aliens are entitled to everything our country has to offer because a life lived outside of our borders is not worth living.” And they make permanent Democrat voters.

As more illegals pour in daily into our states and sanctuary cities, are you prepared to support them all financially, medically, educationally, food stamps, housing, Social Security payments, through your state and federal taxes?

Right now, with a labor force of approximately 165 million, 2.9 people are working to support one retired or disabled American. As illegals keep invading the U.S., the entire Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will collapse.

During Barack Obama’s electoral campaign in 2008 a Democrat Party crowd of 80,000 people was gathered in front of a fake Greek temple erected in Denver – it was proclaimed during that speech that America’s wealth must be redistributed. And our government and NGOs redistribute our money and wealth to millions of illegal aliens flooding in at a staggering rate.

Middle class America is quickly replaced by economic invaders who are willing to vote Democrat in perpetuity if they receive welfare and do not have to pay income taxes.

Rep. Maxine Waters, a socialist nomenklatura member, lectured several oil executives, that “the future of America’s oil industry was socialism.” She tried to walk her statement back, but the intent of the radical left to Sovietize America was clear.

When eastern-bloc socialist countries nationalized their oil industries, the results were a disaster of gasoline rationing, unaffordable prices, and very cold temperatures in apartments and public places in winter.

People were told by the communists in power, who luxuriated in warmth and abundance, that it was for “the common good.” Nobody believed them as we were shivering with our coats on in the reinforced concrete Soviet-style tiny apartments.

Disinformation is everywhere today, a powerful tool employed by rich globalists to transform nations into police states.

Lee’s Trail in Leesylvania Woods and the Cemetery

Potomac River

Climbing Lee’s Trail in Leesylvania woods, I reach the top where the Lee Fairfax Cemetery is located, overlooking the Occoquan Bay. Closer to where the home site used to be, I find blooming clusters of yellow daffodils, remnants of Lucy Grymes’ former gardens. This cemetery was established by the Lees when Henry Lee II died on August 15, 1787. Lucy Lee, his wife, is also buried here; she died in 1792.

                                                    Lucy Grymes' daffodils

The chimney left from the Fairfax house built in 1825

The Lees’ home, Leesylvania, hence the name of the park (Lee’s Woods), stood on the ridge to the east. Henry and Lucy had eight children born in their home, among them the famous “Light Horse Harry” Lee, Revolutionary War hero, Governor of Virginia, and father of Robert Edward Lee. A monument dedicated to “Light Horse Harry” Lee can be found at the bottom of the hill, down a winding mile-long trail, overlooking the Potomac River.

Fenced cemetery

The Lees’ other famous children were Charles Lee, Attorney General of the United States; Richard Bland Lee, the first Congressman for Northern Virginia; and Edmund Jennings Lee, Mayor of Alexandria.

The Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser published an obituary on Lee’s death: “Died on the 15^th Instant, at the seat of Mr. Richard Bland Lee in Loudon County (Sully Plantation), Hon. Henry Lee, Senator for the District of Fairfax and Prince William, in the fifty-eighth year of his age, thirty of which have been assiduously devoted to the service of his Country.”

The Lee family tombstones have long since disappeared. They were replaced with a bronze plaque donated by the Society of the Lees.

Captain Henry Fairfax bought the plantation from the Lees in 1825. He and his third wife Elizabeth are buried in the enclosed portion of the cemetery. The fence seems useless as there are no headstones visible, and the entire plot is always covered in a thick carpet of decaying leaves.

Captain Fairfax died on the sixth of October 1847 and his wife Elizabeth died a month later (November 6). Their headstones were relocated in 1969 to Union Cemetery in Leesburg, close to the tomb of their son, John Walter Fairfax. But their remains are still “resting” within the fenced cemetery.

I hear in the distance the train whistle crossing the river into Leesylvania Woods and begin my descent to the bottom of the hill and fishermen’s pier crossing part of Virginia and Maryland.

Virginia is a state shaped by breathtaking landscapes, rich history, and endless wooded trails, ponds, lakes, creeks, and rivers that had been preserved and protected for generations to come.

The occasional history buff can get lost in the wilderness, contemplating the Commonwealth’s history, and wondering how many people have left their mark, literally and figuratively, on every inch of this fertile soil. If the woods and rivers could talk!

 

A 2019 Warning Ignored by Mimi E. Johnson

Narrenschiff woodcut

In other news around the globe, today marks 30 years since the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. I remember Peter Jennings reporting it on ABC news. I was in 4th grade and had a different understanding than most American children. You see, my mother and grandmother fled a communist country, and even at an early age, I understood the significance of this wall coming down, uniting broken families, and overthrowing a systematic, oppressive government.

This year, it will be 30 years since Romania gained its independence from the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. The people and militia rose up against 50 years of starvation, lack of water, medicine, jobs, fear for their lives, women being taken against their will by the communist police and raped, having no clothes, shoes, standing in line for bread, milk, being rationed everything and having no free choice of anything; they finally had the courage to say ENOUGH, yet after all that, I cannot believe the global sentiments.

It is amazing to me how quickly we forget the pain and suffering millions of people endured and how hard they fought to eradicate the totalitarian communist regime out of their lives. Yet here we are, at the end of 2019, and there has been a massive global wave wanting to bring back this horrific and failed system of government citing “justice for all.” The apropos motto should be “justice for none.”

I wish society viewed communism in the same vein that they view other atrocities, such as slavery and the holocaust; history must not repeat itself. My friends, think hard before you champion something like this coming to our shores. I implore you to talk with people who have experienced horrific tragedies and escaped to tell the story. There are many proud immigrants in this country that are seriously frightened about their existence here in their new chosen homeland. Not because they will be deported, but that their haunting history will follow them here, feeling as if they could never escape the proverbial prisons in which they lived.

The U.S. is at a major crossroads, and it is evident every single day. The communist ideology has already snuck in. I watch video after video of people being beaten and spit on for their political beliefs, or losing friendships over opinions, no tolerance for anything that is different from their wavering thoughts. We have become a society of carnivorous animals waiting to pounce on innocent, unsuspecting prey. The offense monster is terrorizing a city near you. No one is civilized anymore.

We now have natural segregation occurring yet still complain about race relations. If a member of one race attempts to ingratiate themselves into another, there is an uproar! How dare you!

The US has gone beyond being a nation of multiculturalism, more over putting everyone into groups and not assimilating to our inherent value system that makes this nation so appealing to the masses. True multiculturalism is bringing the best things from your country and melding them with others, not segregating yourselves in cities where no one unlike you is allowed.

Our freedoms are disappearing under our noses, yet no one seems to care. Instead, we idolize political leaders and follow them like rats to the pied piper. Political figures are not deities, yet we expect them to be. This is serious and dangerous behavior and thought.

Even terms like “open-mindedness” have become an oxymoron because the caveat is that you are only open-minded if you think “this” or “my” way. We the people are responsible for our societal demise, not politicians.

The inherent truth is that we are a diverse group of religions and ideologies, however, one message that resonates loudly in most religions is to love thy neighbor and do good unto others. Let us get back to that original premise.