The Last "Insurrection" According to the Political Establishment

By Tom DiLorenzo

The Washington establishment, led by a senile 78-year-old man who can barely speak in complete sentences and seems permanently fighting mad, is hell- bent on labeling virtually all Americans who voted for President Trump –Republicans, Independents, and Democrats — as “insurrectionists.”  They have invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 to justify placing thousands of heavily-armed National Guard (and other) troops in Washington, D.C., who appear to be stationed there indefinitely.  Comrade Pelosi, who turns 81 next month and also seems demented, always angry as hell, and extremely frustrated that she is not a dictator, has called for the placement of manned machine gun nests atop the Capitol building.  She is apparently worried that Trump voters might try to create their own version of one of those mass anti-Trump rallies in D.C. that she orchestrated in early 2017, way back when peaceful assembly and freedom of association were still legal and not acts of “insurrection.”  All of this is supposedly being done in the name of warm-and-fuzzy “national unity.”

This political spectacle reminds your author of how the D.C. establishment dealt with “insurrectionists” in the Southern states in the 1860s, particularly in South Carolina.  The “crime” that these “insurrectionists” were said to be guilty of was agreeing with the founding fathers that the American union was a voluntary union of the free and independent states and not a coerced union held together by violence — like the Soviet Union of the twentieth century.

Many Americans know a little something – very little — about General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “march to the sea” through Georgia, an orgy of rape, pillage, plunder, and murder of civilians and the bombing and burning of entire cities occupied only by old men, women, and children.  We are all taught to know as little as possible about it because as Sherman famously said, “war is hell.”  “Move along, nothing to see here” is the meaning of Sherman’s famous quip.  Of course such a nonchalant attitude made it more likely that there would be more orgies of rape, pillage, plunder and murder by the U.S. government, and there were, all over the world, over the past 150 years.

After his march through Georgia Sherman set his sights on South Carolina, something that few Americans seem to know much of anything about.  They have an opportunity to rectify their ignorance, however, by reading (2017) by Karen Stokes.

Karen Stokes is an archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society and the author of numerous non-fiction and fiction books. A Legion of Devils is a compilation of first-hand, eye-witness accounts of how Sherman’s “bummers,” as they were called, exploded with hate and revenge against the “insurrectionists” of South Carolina, the first state to secede in December of 1860.

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