Part II of a Three Part Commentary by Joan Hough Sept. 25 2007

The history of those words is a socialism love story! A socialist, who loathed our Constitutional- Republican form of government and loved a Russian type of socialism, had a mission when he penned the words of our pledge. His mission? --to make eternal an ALL POWERFUL CENTRAL GOVERNMENT, successful in controlling all states and nullifying the U.S. Constitution.

How do I know this? I study American history. Due to the Freedom of Information Act, many gates to our past have been flung open. New, un-indoctrinated historians are revealing truths long hidden, proving that George Santayana was right, that "Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it." How true this is, for in this time of ours, our Constitution continues to be assaulted by politicians and judges, egged on by a dedicated and determined group of politicians and citizens, working to erase our national borders and place us, unconstitutionally, under the United Nations Charter, its World Court and world government. These enemies of our Constitution would see our national sovereignty and our states’ sovereignty gobbled up by NAFTA in league with the United Nations. Our own Congress, comprised of both Republicans and Democrats, and our President have aided and abetted this development. An overweening desire for World (global) control, for money, for the aggrandizement of THE AMERICAN EMPIRE and its controlling elitists, ranks far above any belief in our leaders of the value of the Constitution which gave us a once, magnificent, citizen controlled, limited central government.

The history of our pledge should teach us to look before we leap, and to concern ourselves with the motives of clever folks with a hidden agenda, whose aim is to change our nation and our lives. God knows, in the short history of our America, there have been too many politicians with such agendas.

The more one studies America’s past, the more one realizes how much and how rapidly socialism grew in this nation starting way back when—and how Abe Lincoln’s totalitarianism continues to zing through his Republican Party today, and through that of its sister, the Democratic Party. As more and more modern historians are daring to speak out against the government’s indoctrinated Abe Lincoln cultists, thinking Americans are discovering new truths that now horrify the once innocents who believed Lincoln to be the great and grand statesman, only to discover that he was, virtually, a mass murderer who, knowingly, committed genocide, as well as was responsible for killing many thousands of Northern and Southern men in an unnecessary war.

Recently, this once innocent believer, happened upon a book entitled Lincoln Unmasked by a brilliant iconoclastic author, one Thomas J. DiLorenzo. Had I, as a little Southern girl, known then what DiLorenzo has made it possible for me to know now—I would have been one of those few kiddies in my public, government controlled school who did not recite the Pledge—or at least I would have wanted to be brave enough to be one of the ones. Back then, of course, not saying the pledge was tantamount to committing sacrilege.

Had I had even the faintest inkling of an idea of the true purpose behind the writing of the Pledge, I doubt I could have refrained from causing a commotion in my high school in Louisiana. The very idea of parroting words conceived by a defrocked Baptist minister (Francis Bellamy) who declared himself a "Christian Socialist" and prattled that "Jesus was a socialist" would have caused me marked consternation when I reached the age of reasoning. I would have heard my Sunday school teachers’ words ringing in my ears—that Jesus came to uphold the law, not to defy it. "Think not that I am come to abolish the Law, or the Prophets: I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them."

In my youth, I, accidentally, learned that the LAW in my America was the U.S. Constitution. I did not, however, learn that the U.S. Constitution gave us a Republic, rather than a Democracy. Had I done so, I would, certainly, have scorned not only socialism, but Democracy, as a desirable American form of government. I would have loathed the author of the Pledge, and the government officials who enforced the recitation of the Pledge. I would have viewed with horror all persons supporting Francis Bellamy and his reasons for writing his pledge’s words.

Bellamy, a Lincoln devotee, wrote the Pledge in the year 1892 for the purpose of indoctrinating school children into Abe Lincoln’s philosophy of the "Perpetual nature of the consolidated, unitary, and omnipotent state {central government]." How do I know this? Francis Bellamy said so. He, proudly, admitted it. Thomas J. DiLorenzo dug back into our nation’s documents and found Bellamy’s long forgotten words. Bellamy’s plan was to condition [I suggest the word "brainwash"] children into believing that there was no such thing as state sovereignty and never had been. Bellamy’s goal was to insure that America’s children would grow into adulthood and become voters completely convinced that States Rights/ State Sovereignty did not exist, had never existed and never should/would exist—that the nation could not legally or morally be divided—that it was and is forevermore INDIVISIBLE. Bellamy intended present and future generations of Americans to know in their very bones that Federalism (states rights) was poison and that no state had rights superior to those of the Central Government. This idea, of course, was in direct opposition to those set forth in the U.S. Constitution by the genius creators of our nation—those who studied all ideas presented, debated them, perfected them and then voted them the law of the land.

Francis Bellamy, without a doubt, was a leaf on a limb of a family tree crowded with two too many socialists. His cousin, Edward Bellamy, with whom he was close, was a big boy socialist, a devotee of Soviet style socialism. Edward wrote a number of books pushing Socialism. One of his products, a highly successful fantasy was written in the year 1888. His make-believe hero does a Rip Van Winkle and, eventually, awakens in the year 2000 when industry is owned by, guess who—the all powerful Central Government. All 21 year old males are forced into military service. (Females are excluded, for Americans were not ready to buy that.) Everybody happily works for the government. Everybody retires at age 45. Everybody makes precisely the same bucks. Totalitarian Communism has produced Heaven on earth! When the "oath" was first published, Bellamy, the defrocked preacher, was in charge of education for the "Society of Christian Socialists." The group was a national organization pushing central banking, income taxes, central government controlled education, and other varieties of socialism.

(And isn’t it weird how these disgusting bits of socialism have come to pass in today’s America?

Proves how dedicated folks can accomplish their heart’s desires—nationally controlled education, (no child left behind) breakfast and lunch daily for kids even during summer vacations –at least in Houston, Texas--even income taxes –never dreamt of by our forefathers. The ideas of this kind of thing were not, however, popular with ordinary Americans in Bellamy’s day. Church schools were in the majority. Some states even had state religions.

Bellamy and his buddies managed to get public schools involved in the push to promote the Pledge. A big campaign that! Children were, originally, taught to say the pledge with right arms outstretched in what (later) became the Hitler salute in Germany. This position continued until years later some observant American observed and complained that it was identical to that of Hitler’s followers and of the Italian fascists. The hand on the heart salute must have originated then.

And where did Bellamy get the idea for his and our pledge? Sadly, the Pledge of Allegiance, which I have always thought so beautifully patriotic, was based on one written during the War of Northern Aggression as an Oath of Allegiance to the Lincoln-created, all powerful central government. The forced recitation of it was a way of conditioning children, at the unconscious level, to abhor any idea that the South was right. All must believe, instead, that the nation was designed by our forefathers to never be divided, to be undividable, to be indivisible—that Americans must give all their devotion only to the strong, all powerful central government—that the central government had created the states and not the states, the central government, so the states could never secede. The nation was indivisible from the moment it secured freedom from King George.

Anguish filled my heart when I first read the hideous truth as to the source of Francis Bellamy’s inspiration and idea for the creation of the Pledge of Allegiance. You may have surmised it already. It was taken from those very pledges forced on beaten, starving Southerners after the War of Northern Aggression. How those ancestors of ours must have gagged when forced to recite the demeaning, insulting words in those Republican conceived pledges. In Part III of this trilogy on the Pledge, you will read two of the oaths forced on Southerners –oaths which were to become the Pledge you grew up saying and still say today.

Imagine being unable to operate your small family business unless you "took the pledge—recited the oath of Allegiance to the Union. Imagine not having your state represented in the U.S. government until a large percentage of its citizens took the oath. Imagine not being able to hold a job unless you took the oath. The Oath of Allegiance, also called the Loyalty oath, had to be signed by persons during and after the War the Winners chose to call the "Civil War"—while the losers knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that war was, in all likelihood, one of the most "uncivil" the world has ever known.

The Oath of allegiance, was, initially intended for employees of the Federal government and military personnel, but took several different forms and, eventually, was administered throughout the Southern states. Employment and Business ownership became dependent on oaths taken and signed. Most white Southern males were prohibited from taking the oath.

The "Ironclad oath" during so-called "Reconstruction" (1866 – 1873/1877 and somewhat longer) was a key factor in the punishment of ex-Confederates, forcing them to be without voice in their own land. It was used to prevent all Confederates in 1866 from serving on juries, holding public office, and voting. The oath was not repealed until 1884, but was still used, illegally, after that time by Lincoln Republicans long after the Republican selected Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.. It required every white male to swear he had never borne arms against the Union or supported the Confederacy—that is, he had never "voluntarily" borne arms against the United States and had "voluntarily" given no aid, countenance, counsel or encouragement to rebellious persons and had not even made an attempt to exercise the functions of office under the Confederacy.

Undoubtedly there resulted as a direct reaction to this requirement by the Conquerors some necessary lying. Some desperate people needing to eat, and to feed their children, might have been forced to swallow their pride, trample their conscience and declare that they had not given any "voluntary" support to the Confederacy. This was more possible for elderly men than for their sons and grandsons.

The Lincoln Republicans made haste to place puppet governments throughout Southern lands—most of those "holding office" were loaded to their eyebrows with desires to pluck with greedy hands from the ravaged land every penny possible. Many of them were uneducated blacks fed a mountain of lies by the Republican government and not caring if they spent the states into poverty—which they managed to do.

My Louisiana was assigned to the Fifth Military District along with Texas, and placed under the heels of General Philip SHERIDAN and Winfield Scott HANCOCK. The horrors to which Sheridan and his 35,000 infantry troops and three divisions of cavalry had subjected terrorized women, children, and old men and women to in Woodstock, Virginia on Oct. 6, 1864 were well known to Louisianans. Sheridan had admitted, gleefully to having destroyed over 2200 barns filled with wheat, hay, and faming implements, over 709 mills containing wheat and flour; to having taken 4000 head of family owned cattle, and to have, ruthlessly, killed not less than 3000 sheep and to plan even more destruction in Woodstock.. He drove many, many hundred, even thousands of innocent, Southerners to their deaths by starvation and exposure.

Should you find this impossible to believe, proof lies in Yankee soldiers’ letters home, Sheridan’s soldiers called themselves in such letters "barn burners" and destroyers of homes." One soldier reported that he, personally, burned more than sixty private homes into non-existence and found it hard to see the children and their mothers turned out of doors into the weather of the season. (p. 196 in Chapter "Waging War on Civilians" in the Real Lincoln by Thomas J. DiLorenzo.)

Louisianans had, also, received reports from Harrisonburg, Bridgewater, and Dayton, Virginia where the entire country was wrapped in flames and mourning. So much lamentation, crying and pleading for mercy came from the women, their children, the sick, the lame, and the elderly there that even some of the Yankee soldiers were horrified, well aware that the survivors would be shown no mercy by the elements, nor would they find food anywhere. Louisianans were, also, aware that Lincoln had conveyed his personal thanks and the "thanks of the nation" to General Sheridan for Sheridan’s merciless destruction of the lives of the noncombatants, the defenseless and for the total elimination of their shelter and food. (Read more on this subject in DiLorenzo’s books.) Sherman’s vengeful burning of the homes in Alexandria, LA burned brightly for years in Louisiana minds. Remaining, to this day, in many southern minds are the screams of the women and their kids--as they hobbled, crawled, ran into the Mississippi River in a mad attempt to avoid being burned alive by Sherman's deliberately set flames. Remembered, also, is Sherman's horrific treatment of civilians in Vicksburg, Mississippi—totally whitewashed in the Yankee reports made public during the war, filling the North with the lies still echoed throughout the world by historians and found in the words of university professors and students today but, totally, unrecalled by the central government’s parks historians—even those stationed at Vicksburg, Mississippi. Evidently the Park Services are determined to write history with a Lincoln’s pen stained with Southern blood, while pretending its point loaded only with ink.

Louisianans, as did most Southerners, knew Sheridan to be another Yankee monster. Southerners, by far, better educated than many other Americans at that time, were aware that Sheridan had, as had Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln himself, violated INTERNATIONAL LAW by the planned cruelty to civilians and the Republican programmed starvation, kidnapping, and murder of the innocent. Sheridan, Sherman, Grant and Lincoln himself, as well as the Republican Congress committed genocide.

An enormous number of Southerners, products of superior private schools scattered throughout their states, knew more about the Constitution—the Law of the Land—than those Lincoln Republicans responsible for governing and continuing the administration of punishments to Southerners. Southerners knew the reason they were being punished by their Yankee brothers, during those long years of Reconstruction, was because Southerners had chosen to replicate their ancestors’ behavior in that first war for Independence. Southerners and their South were guilty of seeking liberty from an unjust government and its dictator-king. Just as their American ancestors (living in Virginia, in North Carolina, in South Carolina, and in Georgia and elsewhere in the American states) had made every possible effort to free themselves from an all powerful, despotic British government—so did Americans living in the South attempt to free themselves from a similarly despotic U.S. government. They made no attempt, had no plans, never gave a thought to overthrowing that U.S. government, but wanted only to be left alone.

Contact Joan Hough at joanhough@aol.com.