Our Modern Civil War

March 24, 2002

by Bruce Walker

Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, is sometimes portrayed as ambivalent about slavery. This is simply wrong. Lincoln, who was raised by a deeply religious mother and father, said that he could not remember a time in his life in which he did not believe that slavery was immoral. And consider whether these words seem wishy-washy when Lincoln delivered them in 1858:

• "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolve; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that is the in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it become lawful in all states, old as well as new, North as well as South."

In 1858, the world was already shrinking fast. With the invention of the telegraph, men could communicate from one end of the continent to the other at a speed which rivals most Internet providers even today. The human race also had railroads and steamships, which could transport vast numbers of people and goods across oceans and land masses.

Before the industrial revolution and the explosion of technology in the Nineteenth Century, any potential tyrant was limited by mountains, seas, rivers, deserts, and forests. The Roman and Chinese empires stopped at the end of long logistical lines. The Great War of China had its counterpart in the frontiers of Britannia with the walls of Hadrian and Antonius.

The discovery of the New World began the process of globalizing political power, but even then Americans in the northern and southern portions of their hemisphere could successfully revolt against masters in Europe.

Within the last century, the possibility of conquering the world became real. In late 1945, the United States of America and its British imperial allies of Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, produced much more than half the wealth of the world and also possessed command of the sea and air, as well as a monopoly of fission weapons. No force and no combination of forces could have prevented these democracies from overthrowing the Red Tsar Stalin and from imposing the Party of the People under its leader Chang Kei Sheik in China.

The good guys (note to liberals, that means America and Britain) were the ones holding world hegemony. We chose to bury our dead and feed the hungry millions in other lands, rather than do what a Roman or a Chinese emperor might have done and conquer the world. Under President Reagan, we won a global war again, only this time without oceans of blood and sweat (which in the perverted logic of liberals makes Reagan a lesser president than the bumbling, dishonest FDR).

What would defeat have meant in the Second World War or the Cold War? As so often is the case, the inspiring words of Winston Churchill can provide some instruction at a point in history when Britain and its dominions stood alone, not only against Nazi Germany, but Fascist Italy, and with the tacit support of Communist Russia and Imperial Japan as well. Describing the immediate war with Hitler, Churchill said in the speech most often recognized as "Their Finest Hour":

• "What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. On this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization...Hitler knows that he must break us in this island or lose the war.

• "If we can stand up to him all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad unlit uplands; but if we fail, the whole world, including the United States and all that have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science."

In short, the fate not only of Britain but of mankind rested upon the brave pilots of the Royal Air Force, because if the back of Britain was broken, Nazi power would use its incredible scientific genius to produce horrors and nightmares from which the world might never recover.

Moreover, Winston Churchill did not shrink from noting that this war was between Christian civilization and its direct antithesis: evil. The Second World War was a battle between those Christian values which had made slavery unthinkable, religious toleration and equality before the law essential, and made peace and gentleness high civic virtues against those ideologies which rejected all Christian virtues: National Socialism, Communism, Fascism, and Japanese Imperialism.

Tyrannical secular Moslem potentates like Hussein, fanatical Islam, and geriatric Marxist-phonies in Beijing and Pyongyang all display the same intense hatred of our life affirming values. The globe is no longer big enough for them and for us to live in our separate lands safe in the knowledge that the forces of goodness can be safe behind oceans and navies.

The war began against dehumanizing slavery within our nation almost one hundred and fifty years ago. It smouldered into flames again in the Gulag, the Nazi death camps, and the Killing Fields, and has now become a war between two views of man and God. This war can only end in victory for one view or the other. If we win - as we must - then the world will blossom into a glorious garden of true diversity.

As long as the doorways to nations are open and the societies are free, then these nations will become benevolent competitors for people to live in their lands. Each nation then, just as each individual state of our Republic today, will try to develop the greatest combination of prosperity, culture, liberty, and happiness. Each nation will have variations on the formula for maximizing those benefits, but nations which stray too far - like states of our Republic which enact taxes too onerous or laws too restrictive - will lose people, wealth, and power.

This is a natural equilibrium which insures gradual, peaceful, and democratic adjustments to straighten out the missteps inherent in even the best societies. The globalization of the English language and the Internet will also insure that all of us around the world can share ideas and information easily. The world will be happy and free forever.

If we lose this war, however, the calamity for all of us - even those who think ourselves warm and comfortable now - are too ghastly to imagine. Rogue hordes of dark souls will rampage our small, blue planet unbounded by conscience or physical restraints. It is a war that we cannot afford to lose. It is a war that at all costs we must win. It is our planetary Civil War.

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Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right, Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional and political periodicals.

Send the author an E mail at Walker@ConservativeTruth.org.

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