I discovered Rudyard Kipling at an early age.  My grandfather, who died before I was conceived, evidently loved his work, as he had a number of Kipling's books, which I encountered while prowling the shelves in my grandmother's house.  His prose is great, but where Kipling truly outshines all others is with his verse.  I have spent many happy hours reading and pondering his poetry, for Kipling was a man who not only grasped the human condition in an extraordinary way, but who could bring that understanding home to the readers of his verse.There are many other great English language poets;  Robert Service is another favorite,  and among prose authors I love the words of Joseph Conrad, Jack London, and Ayn Rand, but when it comes to pithy summaries of humanity, Kipling's verse stands alone, for much of it is still relevant to-day.

Some of his works take a bit of work to understand, for the cultural referents are lacking here in the 21st century, but all his work is worth taking the time to understand it.  Many of his poems are to be found here-  http://www.kipling.org.uk/.  His work is so good that I have a hard time choosing especial favorites, but given the news of late I am minded of several to-day.  The first came to mind with respect to the situation in Korea, where, at least according to North Korea, we are once again at war.  With that in mind, I give you Kipling's Dane-Geld (pronounced Da-neh geld {hard g})-

'Dane-Geld A.D. 980-1016
By Rudyard Kipling

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: –
“We invaded you last night–we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ‘em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll be rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: –
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: –

“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!” '
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With regard to our domestic policy and present insane spending spree, I am minded of another Kipling masterwork, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" written in 1919, after the death of his son. 

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

I also recall one of his epitaphs from the Great War (world War 1)-

A DEAD STATESMAN

"I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young? "

Third and last, I give you MacDonough's song-

"MacDonough's Song
"As Easy as A.B.C" in A Diversity of Creatures

WHETHER the State can loose and bind
In Heaven as well as on Earth:
If it be wiser to kill mankind
Before or after the birth--

These are matters of high concern
Where State-kept schoolmen are;
But Holy State (we have lived to learn)
Endeth in Holy War.

Whether The People be led by The Lord,
Or lured by the loudest throat:
If it be quicker to die by the sword
Or cheaper to die by the vote--

These are things we have dealt with once,
(And they will not rise from their grave)
For Holy People, however it runs,
Endeth in wholly Slave.

Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!

Holy State or Holy King--
Or Holy People’s Will--
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
Order the guns and kill!

Saying—after—me:--
Once there was The People—Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
Once there was The People—it shall never be again!"


If ever there were prescient verse, here it be written!
I fear what dreadful harvest those presently in authority shall reap.....and us along with them, will-ye, nil-ye. "Power above and beyond the Laws..." indeed.

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Kipling has some advice for the next generation, to help keep them from repeating our folly:
"I Keep Six Honest Serving Men ...

I KEEP six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five,
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men.
But different folk have different views;
I know a person small--
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!

She sends'em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes--
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!"

Or as Robert Heinlein put it, less eloquently, but more forcefully-

"What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history"; what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"

So.  I commend Kipling to your especial attention, in the expectation that your reading will bring you satisfaction, wisdom, and enlightenment. Perhaps even a bit of joy.  I could maunder on for hours, but as it is Passover, I will close by asking each of you, gentle readers, to remember that to be human is to be free. 

Yours in Liberty,

Historian

I read an article by 'American Mercenary' -Link  in which he talked about the difficulty of restoring the American Republic, and the Constitution.  No doubt, there are hard times coming, hard lessons to be relearned in a brutal manner.  Freedom is not free, and the only way to pay for it is in sweat and blood. Like all unpaid obligations, such debts grow bigger over time, and just as with our national credit, Liberty in these presently united States has been dreadfully abused.  I agree with A M, too, on the low probability of restoring these presently united States to being a carbon copy of the original federation of independent states under the Constitution.  Even if such were possible,the Constitution like any other document created by humans, has flaws; witness the mess we are in today.

But although this attempt at applying Enlightenment philosophy to the government of a free people (meaning the Constitution) has problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment on which it was founded are still valid.  Just as the Articles of Confederation were superseded by the Constitution, so will the Constitution and the republic which grew under it be superseded by something else.  What will follow it, however, is not written yet.  Who will do the writing?  What will be said?  Which ideas will be it's foundation? 

How was all this done two and a quarter centuries ago?  Understanding the motivations of the Federalists who wrote it allows a better understanding of how and why we got the Constitution we ended up with.  It also shows how we can improve upon it.

Take some time, and study the history of the writing of the Constitution of the United States.  A good start is Max Farrand's book, "The Framing of the Constitution of the United States."  Written a hundred years ago, and still in print today, it is an excellent starting place to understand how and why the Constitution was created, and to understand the men who wrote it.  Many of them were no smarter or wiser than many of us, although some were better read, and that it the point of this:  each of us should aspire to building something better. And by this, I mean you.  Yes, YOU!  The individual reading this. YOU can make a difference.

Not long ago, in my wanderings about the blogosphere (I read many dozens every week, and I cannot recall at the moment which one it was...) I read an article which pointed out the importance of individual action.  Talking about German reunification and the actions of Kohl, it made the point that the right person at the right time can make a huge difference in outcome. Nobody in 1989 would have given a nickel's worth of credence to the idea that Germany would reunify, yet here we are with the deed done, due in large part to an unremarkable politician named Helmut Kohl who saw the opportunity and took advantage of it.

In 1774, very few Americans were even discussing the possibility of an independent America. Yet two years later each of the thirteen colonies had revolted against the most powerful empire in the world, and ultimately beat the largest, most powerful military in the world.  How?  Ideas.  Ideas inculcated in the body of the population, ideas expressed in pamphlets and leaflets, ideas which set the minds of individual people alight. We won the American Revolution because of ideas, embodied and defended by individuals who fought for them. (2 million pounds of French gunpowder combined with one of the only French defeats of the Royal Navy helped a lot, I must admit, but these events are further proof of the power of the individual.  Would the French have intervened without Franklin?)

The philosophy of freedom, the ideals of the Enlightenment are so powerful that I believe it is a mistake to underestimate what can happen when they are employed.  When those are combined with the power of the individual, they can shake the world.  If each reader of this blog were to spread the ideas of the Enlightenment locally, and cultivate liberty in their neighborhood, the results would be out of all proportion to the effort involved.  Philosophy, or the lack of it, is the reason that we are in the mess in which we find ourselves.  Philosophy, and attention to the ideals of the Enlightenment, is the path out of the swamp of collectivism in which we are mired.

We have a demonstrably better set of ideas than our opponents, but we have done a terrible job of promoting these ideas.  The collectivists and statists have entered the war of ideas and won by default, because the FreeFor wasn't on the field. That must change if we are to win, and each of you can be a part of it.

If Americans are to once again demonstrate to the world American exceptionalism we must win the war of ideas.  Education is the key.  We must teach people what freedom is, why liberty is important, what individual rights are and are not, and we must explain why these ideas are so vitally important.  Each of us ought to dedicate ourselves to planting the seeds of Liberty.

It is true that history does not exactly repeat itself, and it is unlikely that we can recreate the united States of 1781,  but an historical rhyme of liberty would be most pleasing, and is certain eventually.  I am intent on hearing it in my lifetime.  How about you?  Plant the seeds of Liberty,  the ideas of freedom,  and you can enjoy the harvest of freedom.

When I took my engineering degree a number of years ago the school required that every engineer attend a 4 semester series of classes in the Engineering Humanities program.  Occasionally, those few students with outstanding English SATs  could be exempted from the first semester of the four, but nobody would be further exempted from this requirement;  you had to take at least three of the four semesters.  I was allowed to skip the first semester, but not the second.  I argued my best, and exerted a considerable amount of effort, taking my case all the way to the Dean, but to no avail.

Facing what I thought to be a waste of my time, and now being required to comply, I could not decide which course to pick.  If I recall correctly, there were at least half a dozen classes on all sorts of topics.  With human history (one of my main interests,) being largely a matter of preparation for conflict, conflict, and the aftermath of conflict, in the event I could not resist the second semester elective entitled "Technology, Aggression, and Peace."  The class examined the history of engineering as it related to warfare, and the moral implications of participating in engineering work related to making war.  In hindsight, I was never so glad to have lost an argument with the Dean, for that class fascinated me and sparked an interest which continues to this day.

Given only 41 class sessions, the coverage was necessarily brief, but one era we studied for about a month was the Holocaust.  We studied how the death camps were conceived, designed, and constructed.  Some of the reading assignments gave me memorable nightmares, but although the mundane mechanisms of genocide were laid bare, dry paperwork documenting the systematic eradication of a group of human beings, there were several questions left unanswered.  One was "How did the German government know who the Jews were?" 

The answer may horrify you, but I found out years later in a book by Edwin Black that the Germans contracted with a US company to create records using German census data.  This company, which also carried out secret data management work for the United States government, was IBM.  They methodically sorted and compiled mountains of data gleaned from past German census takers to compile detailed files on every identifiable Jew in Europe.  It was IBM punchcard sorting technology which made the horrific efficiency of the Holocaust possible. 

One example to which I have already referred is that of Warsaw, Poland.  A 1939 census showed that there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Warsaw, and it recorded their names, addresses, occupations, incomes and a variety of other information, including their family member's names.  The punchcard databases helped the Germans be most thorough.  Today, some 68 years later, only a few hundred Jews live in Warsaw. Philosophy made it possible, people made it happen, but the databases made it efficient.

Today, I hear a haunting echo from the past, as if the ghosts of millions of slaughtered Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and intellectuals were whispering in my ears.  I hear that echo whenever I hear the words "Real ID."  Free countries do not require ID cards, or identification papers, or any other means of tracking and locating their people; totalitarian police states do.  Free countries do not set up databases, whether of punchcards or solid-state memory chips, to record information about their people.  But totalitarian police states do.  What sort of country are we really living in?

One of many things I have learned in my study of history is that governments murdered over 170 million of their own people during the last century.  First, they disarmed them, then they killed them.  As previously discussed, that is the calculus of genocide.  But more important is what made atrocity after atrocity possible; information, detailed files on each person, information that could be, and was, used by governments to slaughter tens of millions of people.  It is not simply firearms registration that one ought to fear, it is databases recording personal information collected on every person alive.  Separate databases are bad enough, but a single unified government database which has detailed records on your medical condition, your purchase history, your friends, emails, and every other personal detail about you is a terrifying abomination.

And THAT is what Real ID is, an effort to create a single integrated database that government can use... to do what, exactly?  And where did they get this power?  That is the first question that one ought to ask-  "Does the Federal Government have the specific enumerated power to collect data on each citizen?  Where does it say that in the Constitution?" Anybody?  *I* have not seen it.

What we ought to call Real ID is "the Genocide Enabling Act" f or that is exactly how it will be used.  Don't forget to remind your representatives that there is no good purpose for government databases.  We need to repeal Real ID, but in the meantime I urge every patriotic American to do everything possible to corrupt ALL of the data being collected on you every day.  Misspell names, transpose digits, provide frivolous responses.  Create fictitious on-line personas. Add a dozen fictional people to your household.  John may buy vitamins while George chats about hockey, and Agnes blogs about knitting.   You may not be able to prevent data from being collected, and you may be too old to fight physically should that sad day ever come, but if you make a point of corrupting the databases being built, you may save hundreds or even thousands of lives.
Including yours.