Dick Bishirjian

Richmond, Virginia, once the capital of Secession, is now like all “losers,” neglected and rejected.

Richmond does not even have a USPS central clearing center.

The Governor’s mansion on the grounds of the State Capitol building is home to a regional physician from a remote corner of the Virginia’s Peninsula with access to the mainland only by a bridge.

Governor Ralph Northam, an advocate for late term abortions, represents only one section of the State—the northern Virginia “Beltway” of communities where federal government workers reside and graze at the trough of high State and Federal taxes. Once discerning citizens chose to live in Virginia in order to avoid the District of Columbia’s high taxes.  No longer. Virginia is now a “high tax” state dotted by memorials to Virginia’s illustrious past–one less today than last month.

A beautiful boulevard in Richmond where stately homes reside alongside monuments to deceased patriots was witness this week to removal of a monument to Robert E. Lee.  The attempted erasure of General Lee from historical memory will endure only for about fifty years when curious Virginians reexamine the reasons General Lee fought on the side of Virginia and not on the side of the National government.

That act, equivalent to choosing aged bourbon over vodka, is what you did back then.

Unfortunately, Lee was the greatest military mind of his generation and his decision prolonged a civil war that gave us six hundred and fifty-five thousand battle casualties and transformed America into a secular nation state.

Now, even a monument to a memory of what once was, has been swept aside by revolutionary passions that Tocqueville called esprit revolutionaire.

Nothing good comes about when tradition is dismissed by revolutionary fervor and this seeming insignificant act by the Governor of Virginia should not be ignored.

Similarities to recent Spanish history are cause for serious concern.

Donald Trump’s lead Re-Election campaign operative, Matt Braynard, an Executive Director at Look Ahead America is organizing a “Justice for J6” rally on September 18, in Washington, D.C.

Matt was a Senior Analyst at Election Data Services that provided elections analysis and services to the 2020 Trump campaign for President.

On August 27, Braynard’s Look Ahead America presented a “demand” to the United Nations for “relief” from prosecution by the Justice Department of insurrectionists arrested for the January 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol.

Those arrested were “political prisoners,” Look Ahead America asserted.

Former President Donald Trump has asserted that he won the 2020 Presidential election and has expressed his belief that he will be reinstated.

Trump’s organized invasion of the Capitol, designed to stop certifying the election of Joe Biden by the Electoral College, was the first time that a President of the United States sought to circumvent the Constitutional responsibility of the Electoral College.

Though Look Ahead America’s rally on January 18 is more symbolic than real, this event is part of Donald Trump’s rallying of his supporters at events like CPAC, controlled by a Trump loyalist, and last month’s rally in Alabama.

President Joe Biden’s radical policies initiated with slim Congressional majorities and the recent Afghan debacle assure that Republicans will win majorities in Congress in 2022 and Impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden will commence in January 2023.

Will that sate Donald Trump’s lust for power, or will he demand that he be reinstated as President of the United States? Is a Coup d’état coming as I argued on August 1?

Roe v. Wade was literally an abortion, foisted on an unsuspecting nation by Mr. Justice Harry Blackmun, a member of the Burger Court that succeeded the “activist” Warren Court of Earl Warren (an Eisenhower appointee).

After death and resignations swept clean members of the Warren Court, the Chief Justice had more conservative Supreme Court associate members: Harry Blackman,  Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist, and John Paul Stevens.

As an attorney Blackmun was Resident Counsel at the Mayo Clinic and did the tax returns for Mayo Clinic physicians. That slim connection to the practice of Medicine qualified Blackmun to speak for the majority in Roe v. Wade.

A reason as ridiculous as that was characteristic of appointees to the Supreme Court of President Richard Nixon and the vapid judicial philosophy of Chief Justice Warren Burger.

If blame for Roe v. Wade must be placed, the trail leads to Richard Nixon and his generation of World War II veterans who may have been taught “Americanism” in high school, but had  no interest in philosophy, theology or ethics.

That has been a dominant characteristic of the generation of World War II Americans who benefited from the classical insights of the generation of the Founding, but not their classical education in Latin, the history of Greece and Rome and the political writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero. They gave us Roe v. Wade.

Earlier in American history, existence of slavery in predominantly Southern States, wealth in New England created by shipping of slaves on Yankee Clippers, and labor intensive agriculture in the South thwarted a compromise between those who sought to abolish the institution of slavery and slave owners. Six hundred and fifty-five thousand battle-related deaths later, slavery was abolished and the American republic began its transformation into a centralized administrative state.

That generation gave us Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), a case that established the principle that African Americans were not citizens of the United States because they were not included under the term “people” of the United States and had no standing as legal persons under the laws of the United States.

One hundred and sixteen years later, after a Civil War and passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868, another Supreme Court justice clumsily affirmed in Roe v. Wade (1973) the principle that the unborn were not legal persons under the laws of the United States.

That decision, called “the gift that keeps on giving,” led to formation of the “Right to Life” movement and a belief of generations of American women who claim they have the right to kill their unborn children.

A question in the minds of Muslim leaders in southern Asia and national security professionals in the United States and Western Europe is whether the religion of Afghan Taliban leaders will permit them to form and administer an Afghan government.

Is it Islamic zealotry that we see in the faces of gun-toting Taliban “militia” or is that a zeal for national identity?

After all, Donald Trump was not alone in forcefully advocating a “New Nationalism.”

The peoples of former “Captive Nations” of the Soviet Union–Poland, Hungary, Georgia, and even, Belarus–are experiencing a rebirth of national consciousness.

This has alarmed the states of the European Union, long wedded to an ideology of “Internationalism” and that explains the alarm of the United States and governments in Western Europe.

“Make My Nation Great” smacks of nationalist movements that consumed Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolph Hitler and in 2021 Islamic regimes in Iran and Afghanistan.

Something is happening in nation-states where political activists feel that political action is needed to regain or reassert their national identity.

Conservatives in the UK who led the Brexit movement “get it,” as do nationalists in Eastern Europe who see a way to reverse decline of Western culture by asserting their own national identity.

Apparently, so do the Afghan Taliban.

The question we must ask is what is dominant:  Islamic zealotry or Afghan nationalism.