“Lay Down Your Arms and All Will Be As Before”

Via Bernhard

“Lay Down Your Arms and All Will Be As Before”

“Imagine America invaded by a foreign power, one that has quadruple the population and industrial base. Imagine that this enemy has free access to the world’s goods as well as an inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder from the proletariat of other countries, while America itself is tightly blockaded from the outside world.

New York and Cincinnati have been taken. For months, Boston and Chicago have been under constant siege, the civilian population driven from their homes.  Enemy forces roam over large parts of the country burning the homes, tools and food of the non-combatants in a campaign of deliberate terrorism.

Nearly 85 percent of the nation’s able-bodied males (up to 50 years of age) have been called to arms.  Battlefield casualties have run to 39 percent and deaths amount to nearly half of that, far exceeding those of any other war. 

On the other hand, the enemy, through its acts and domestic propaganda indicate otherwise, is telling the American population that it wants only peace and the restoration of the status quo antebellum.  Lay down your arms and all will be as before.

What would be the state of our morale in such conditions? Americans have never suffered such misfortune, have they?  Alas, they have. This was the experience of the Southern people from 1861-1865 in their lost War for Independence.” 

(Clyde Wilson, An Honorable Defeat, Chronicles, October 1998, excerpt, pg. 28)