Here at the fall of Western civilization, it’s more important than ever to preserve memories of history’s greatest culture.
I’m old enough to remember when the manufactured outrage against Columbus Day started to gain traction. I also remember the anemic response from BoomerCons, who couldn’t conceive that the institutions and traditions they took for granted could ever be cast down. This, despite the fact that many in their generation fought tooth and nail to do just that.
If this be the end, then so be it. But let younger generations take warning. Our ancestors, who built the world we enjoyed in childhood, now task us with keeping and handing down its memory.
It won’t be easy. Because the ruling regime of Death Cultists pushing the West toward the End of History will gaslight, nudge, and coerce everyone into not just forsaking the old ways, but denying they ever existed.
One lesson attributed to Columbus provides a salutary reminder. Upon his return from his first historic voyage, the Admiral was being feted at the Spanish court. One wag at the table was heard to remark “Aren’t we making a lot of fuss over a rather modest deed?”
“Could you have done the same?” another dignitary asked.
“Anyone could have,” said the first. “It seems a simple matter of sailing west until one reaches land.”
At that, the Admiral took a hard-boiled egg from a dish and held it between his thumb and forefinger. “Can you – any of you – stand an egg on end?”
The whole august gathering took the Admiral’s challenge. Not one of them succeeded. Eggs flopped and rolled across the King’s table.
When the other guests had given up, the Admiral cracked his egg against the table, flattening one end, on which he stood the egg upright.
Blushing, the other dinner guests repeated his feat.
“Of course it is simple for you to do,” the Admiral said, “now that I have shown you how.”
Most people see pride as the besetting sin of great men. But it is a vice of mediocrities.
The great suffer no shortage of ankle-biters and hecklers. But they are great because they hold to their vision through adversity.
Deny the mediocrities their revenge.
Hold and hand down your great ancestors’ achievements.
For another tale of visionaries on a trailblazing voyage into the unexpected, read my award-worthy debut novel.
Brian,
In honour of both the discovery and our Lady of Pilar’s day, Here are some Spanish language books defending Spanish colonization (both good and bad)
https://edicionesencuentro.com/libro/sobre-la-leyenda-negra-2/
https://edicionesencuentro.com/libro/nuebas-mentirosas/ (on Cortes and the lies etc about him and the Mexican conquest)
It’s rather telling, there’s are no polemical books about Pizarro and the conquest of Peru. Doesn’t seem to have generated as much controversy or interest as Cortes. Yet the Incas were in their own way just as brutal.
Imperialphobia and the Black legend
https://siruela.com/catalogo.php?id_libro=3513&completa=S&titulo=imperiofobia-y-leyenda-negra&autor=elvira-roca-barea
@Guillie_Nicieza (Iberian naval history in Spanish; a helpful reminder that the Brits weren’t the only seafaring people in history with a seaborne empire)
xavier
The Designated Villain about whose awesomeness I personally cannot shut up is Allan Pinkerton. Take the whole story of the Agency together, and it is like an Arthurian tragedy where avarice takes the place of adulteries — but, with an Arthurian tragedy, what you most remember is the deeds of the knights.
I am not familiar with that story. Tell us more.
Well. Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, for those who know the name at all, is generally a byword for anti-labor head-crackers. And they did in fact come to be that. And by now, of course – it’s the way of the modern institution – what rags remain of the Agency, and the unions too, are dedicated to accruing a maximum of comfort and power for their leaders with as little real courage or accomplishment as they can squeak by with. If tomorrow you see a man in a Securitas uniform standing about the front of a store, committed to the firm duty of looking vaguely intimidating while doing absolutely nothing, you may tug your forelock and tell him “hajimemashite.”
Because none of that has to do with how the thing began.
Allan Pinkerton’s early ups and downs were only a bare shade more colorful than the standards of the time – meaning, by our standards, staggering setbacks and vast estates of resilience – an upbringing in one of the most crime-ridden sectors of early industrial Glasgow; a hasty marriage, proving lifelong, made on the wings of a political exile from Britain; shipwreck; near-shipwreck; poverty; a gradual climb to a living.
Now, please think of all the fundamental and lost things taken for granted in the following words. He had a stint at a bar, where he was trained to help in the making of the casks. He soon became a good enough hand at barrel-making to strike out on his own, but in order to get material more cheaply, to provide for his wife, Allan Pinkerton elected to cut down some of the trees on a nearby river island. It was there that he discovered a deserted campfire. That was Illinois in the year 1847 – no time nor place for anyone to camp at leisure – so it was plain that someone there was up to no good. And Pinkerton (a quite grown man) came back to the island, a number of times, simply to make out who it was. When he came at night, he at last discovered the gang of counterfeiters encamped there, and the next night brought out local law enforcement to round them up. If the place is not called Bogus Island to this day, it is only because the people of Illinois have forgotten in the past sixty years. It may be, still.
Having a new reputation for detective work, he began to be called on for it, and discovered thereby a very strong streak for infiltration, and a zest for adventure, and elected to make a business of that.
He gathered men of like attitude, and also a very remarkable woman who shoved her toe in the door to be the first of the Ladies’ Corps (which had no glimmer of existence until she made a highly persuasive interview). Their tactics were a fantastical brew that could only be fermented in America: a great subtlety of infiltration, inveigled by a breathtaking brazenness in the cover, investigating swindles, rake-offs and the odd murder across the Old Northwest. And to keep the Agency from corruption, they drew up a charter called the General Principles, as true a code of chivalry as the nineteenth century ever drafted. It would do no good in the end, for Pinkerton was an atheist, and had no intrinsic defense against the many ways a thing built by man could be chipped away. But, for another two and a half decades, it would hold firm enough.
And tomorrow, I will tell you how Allan Pinkerton bought the nation for twenty-five dollars.
The means by which the state of Maryland landed on the Union side of the Civil War in the summer of 1861 can be best described as one part diplomatic concession, one part gubernatorial dithering, and three parts sheer coup. It is, therefore, one of those things that serve to make me rest easier about the general air of political ruthlessness in these quarters of the Internet. Maryland, perched as it was on the Capitol’s northern border, was an absolute military necessity, and to arrest the state legislature at that stage was no more than to act against a known enemy state.
Well. The situation in Maryland that summer was also the situation in Maryland the preceding winter. Neither the politics, nor the geography, were different. And in Baltimore – the same relentlessly politicized township that (according to one of the more convincing theories) killed Edgar Allan Poe to sway the outcome of an off-year election – Southern sympathy was fast gelling into outright conspiracy.
It was Baltimore that Abraham Lincoln had to get across in order to enter Washington as president. The conspiracy, led by a well-connected Garibaldian barber by the name of Cypriano Ferrandini, vowed he would never do so alive.
Allan Pinkerton entered the fray in the guise of a garrulous stockbroker from Georgia: he did not yet know the nature of the danger, but he certainly did know the source. As the investigation was prompted by a major railroad company (concerned about sabotage), he was joined by at least four compatriots. One was Kate Warne, aforementioned inventor-of-her-own-job-post; one somewhat recedes into the mists of time, but seems likely to have been John Scully, on whom more later; and the last two posed as a couple: there was Hattie Lawton, and there was Timothy Webster, who was, without question, the finest detective, and best man, Pinkerton then had in his employ.
Pinkerton was the first to strike pay dirt when he encountered a conspirator by the name of Luckett who offered a bit of a wink-and-nudge concerning Lincoln’s travel prospects. He handed Luckett twenty-five dollars on the spot (about $900 in today’s money), and, having obviously formed an instant friendship with the man, he soon secured Webster and the Unknown Agent introductions to Ferrandini.
Some time into the infiltration, the conspirators were told to draw lots to see who would be the one sworn to kill Lincoln. As the Unknown Agent records, he drew the fatal marker, and thought it a grand stroke of luck until he compared notes with Webster, who had drawn it as well – meaning, almost certainly, that every man in the room was led to believe that the assassination stood or fell on his own personal efforts.
At this juncture, Pinkerton thought it high time he and Warne peeled off for a state visit. But Lincoln – undoubted Most Unpopular President-Elect In American History, a man who got death threats more regularly than the morning paper – was less than credulous.
What changed matters was the unannounced appearance of a strange young man in Lincoln’s hotel room. This was Frederick Seward, son of the soon-to-be Secretary of State, who gave a warning from two entirely separate detectives, Sampson and Devoe of New York, who, though inferior as spies, most definitely caught the same scent.
(History buffs will at this point be gratified to know that good relations between Allan Pinkerton and the Seward family would continue. Their histories will interweave in two further incidents of note.)
And so, in Harrisburg on the 22nd of February, Lincoln, with devoted bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, quietly departed his press-studded Special in order to double back to Philadelphia, join up with Pinkerton and Warne, and approach Baltimore days early, in the dead of night, from the only alternate point of entry (known now as President’s Station.) As a precaution, Pinkerton ordered all outgoing telegrams from Harrisburg shut off (the operator, taking it too literally, had to be punched in the shoulder by coded telegraph to hastily add that Lincoln, though delayed, was indeed en route.)
The chief hurdle, as you may imagine, was the fundamental impossibility of disguising Abraham Lincoln for long. The best Pinkerton and Warne could manage was to delay the train with some artful waffle about important documents, buy up an entire compartment, bundle Lincoln up under an uncharacteristic hat, and pass him off as Warne’s invalid brother, who required a rear door. Even then, the engineer most definitely recognized Lincoln – fortunately, his opinion on the matter was only that it was monstrous unfair for Pinkerton to hold out on such a splendid secret.
When Lincoln made it through to Washington, an independent witness reports a note being passed reading Lincoln is in this hotel!, whereon a Democratic eminent’s first response was to exclaim “how the devil did he get through Baltimore?” (Sadly, I remember the names of none of the three people involved here.)
Allan Pinkerton came back briefly, and told a despondent Luckett he had better be moving on to Georgia. Luckett glumy offered to return him the twenty-five dollars. Pinkerton talked him down to five.
Sampson and Devoe – because Webster took it on himself to lead the posse that lit on them as the reason Lincoln twigged – narrowly escaped with their lives a week later from the same hotel. Webster’s cover was unscathed by the incident: he would remain as an active spy in Baltimore, and leave only to go on to spy in Richmond.
That will serve well as our hook for the next installment, which comes Monday.
Do you have your own blog or publish your writing in book form? Your historical writing is excellent.
This is a salutary reminder to always be on guard against the people who purport to explode the “myth” of the golden past. One recent comic I saw features a series of panels, each with an elder telling a youth that life was better in the past. It proceeds from a Jetsons style future to a Boomer, a Victorian, a Medieval, a caveman, a dinosaur, and finally an amoeba. The core message, of course, is that the past was just as bad as the present and only nostalgia and self-deception tell us otherwise, which most of the commenters beneath it seemed to pick up on. Some took up a minor variant, and claimed that the Golden Past is just a faint memory of carefree childhood. I find this especially insidious, because it seems on the surface to be innocent. People do indeed romanticise the past, but this in no way means that all times are as good as each other, only that each time seems more good than it was.
The folks parroting that line are coping. They’re also forgetting that the internet exists. We can compare metrics. The all-time historic high inflation and deaths of despair, for instance.
Something that divides Gen Y and Millennials is the ability to look at the past. And this is not just personal nostalgia (though certainly Gen Y has plenty of that!) but also an appreciation of works that came from earlier eras.
I started thinking about this when I saw someone defend the Disney remakes on the grounds of “kids hate watching old stuff.” Since when? I routinely rented videos from the 80’s, 70’s and 60’s as did all the other kids I knew in the 90’s. Star Wars was huge but the first movie was over a decade old by that point and the prequels hadn’t come out yet. And Disney movies were especially timeless: kids were more than happy to watch stuff like Robin Hood (1973), Alice in Wonderland (1951) or Pinocchio (1940).
It’s only in the 00’s and especially the 10’s that parents got the idea that their children would not watch anything from more than five or so years go (with the exception of active franchises, like the early movies in the MCU.)
This has a consequence of making it easy to erase the past. I only saw one active rotary phone in my life, but I knew exactly how they worked from movies and TV shows. But many Zoomers struggle with the concept of someone in the 80s not being able to check something on their phone. And this also applies to more serious matters: if you watch old media you get an imperfect but pretty accurate idea of the culture of the time, but if you don’t you’ll believe any lie said about it. And when you take someone who has no accurate information about the 90’s it’s child’s play to get him to believe whatever you want about 1492.
What galls me is hearing some people say “you think you would prefer such and such a movie or such and such a story but you really wouldn’t.” As if everyone were ADHD now and can only enjoy movies that have no story, only spectacle; books where the main characters are not just relatable but near identical to the reader; and music that is written by the same one or two people.
Wow. Milo Yiannopoulos made an interesting point about this very thing. He noticed when he rejected sodomy returned to the Church that 1.) Dogs stopped barking at him, and 2). When he went to movies, he started taking an interest in the story rather the the spectacle as he used to do.
It’s somewhere in this speech:
https://youtu.be/UaYtOYH8OKE
Millennials’ aesthetic disenfranchisement never ceases to amaze. Or dismay. A dissident Millennial commentator I otherwise respect was just trashing a whole slate of 90s movies. None of them were high art, mind you. But many were blockbusters from back when that was a genuine mark of public acclaim. At the same time, this individual broadcasts his consumption of MCU and Mouse Wars skinsuits. It’s not malicious. It’s how that generation was raised.
That’s not just curmudgeonly grousing. Only a new elite can replace our current satanic ruling class. The way events are unfolding, that elite will be composed of Millennials. If they hope to restore American culture, someone will need to acquaint them with it.
Up until the final triumph of home video in the mid-90s, you’d often get theatrical re-releases of old films–and they’d be accompanied by massive advertising campaigns, licensing deals, and the works. Meanwhile, television was filled with syndication and reruns from the early days, and there were even books published introducing younger readers to the older stuff. I still have found memories of the Crestwood House books, which highlighted vintage 30s–60s horror and sci-fi movies and were published from 1977 to 1987 for an elementary school audience.