When a government is allowed to hold its people hostage at the end of a crusader’s sword, assembling armies of red-tie legislators and black-robed judges, spouting totalitarian, pseudo-religious, master race moral superiority, it is our own moral imperative to draw a line in the sand and hold it. Manifest Destiny may have been a convenient excuse to build this country, but it is a weak and insecure administration that uses a land grab policy as a way to take control of the moral compass line we toe.

I used to think that Americans were smart enough to know when this type of abuse of might had gone too far. I always thought there were enough of us who saw through political demagoguery to know the difference between political pandering and god-awful policy. It seems I was wrong.

Even the changes in Congress last year are only a burp, more about Iraq than anything related to God and morals.

The problem is we count on politicians to do right by us much in the same way some parents expect their children’s teachers to parent their kids. It is a responsibility we cannot, must not, abdicate to those in power. They will only do as much as they can get away with, and maybe slightly more if there’s enough money involved.

God, like good character, starts in the home, not on Capitol Hill. Like past mistakes, one’s feelings toward God should inform one’s actions, not control them. If those who would put our necks to the sword could understand that, perhaps they would stop trying to control the rest of us.

Do you ever remember as a child saying “It’s a free country”?

How easily I said it then.

It is almost impossible to hang practices like the Pledge on any particular “ism.” It is, if one wants to do so, possible to see how the education system in America began to change right about “Pledge time” from one which encouraged pupils to question everything into one designed to turn out a more compliant citizen for the factories (and wars) springing up everywhere.

That’s another discussion though

In 1892, a big celebration (National Public School Celebration) was planned to have children observe the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landing. James Upham, from The Youth’s Companion magazine, wasn’t happy with the versions of the pledge he tried to write, and finally asked Francis Bellamy to write it.

Francis had been a Baptist minister, but was pushed out of the church because (like his cousin author Edward Bellamy) he was a utopian socialist and incorporated those ideals into his sermons. Francis recognized the absurdity of adding “equality” to the pledge, but for some reason felt solid on liberty and justice. Despite the French Revolutionary reference, fraternity doesn’t appear to have been considered… The “indivisible” part appears to have been a reference to the Civil War. In the original, neither the words “United States” or “under God” appear.

The first massive pledge by adults was at a national liberty pole and flag raising in New Jersey (1893), which was set up by William McDowell (a founder of the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution). Bellamy was there, talking about training young Americans to fulfill America’s “divine mission.” After that, Grover Cleveland led much pageantry at the Chicago World Fair (1893). New York was the first to mandate the pledge (1898). In 1923/24 the National Flag conference - pressured by the American Legion and Daughters of the American Revolution who feared that immigrants would actually be saluting the flags of their home countries with the US pledge - got “my flag” changed to “the Flag of the United States of America.” Bellamy’s protest was ignored.

Originally, it was a military salute - right hand lifted, palm down, at forehead level, then arm outstretched. This was the historical civilian salute of the United States, from 1787-1934 (since 1892, known as the “Bellamy salute.”) The US was not alone; it was also the historical army salute in the Middle East and South America. In 1942 when pledge was officially recognized by Congress in the U.S. Flag Code, they also abolished the “Bellamy salute” as being too close to the Nazi one. President Roosevelt instituted the hand over the heart as the salute to be rendered by civilians during the pledge (and the national anthem).

The mandated salute/pledge was legally challenged by Jehovah’s Witnesses and only one year later the Supreme Court ruled that school children could not be forced to recite it. The 1943 Barnette opinion still holds as constitutional doctrine with regard to the salute/pledge - and this is a great quote to use for those who pretend that the flag is sacred:

Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard…. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent….
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Interesting that the Catholic group The Knights of Columbus are the ones that persuaded President Eisenhower to add the words “under God” in 1954. Dwight D. Eisenhower (with Jehovah’s Witness family members and cognizant of the rising power of the miltary-industrial complex) said “In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace and war.” This was in the context of the political and material battle against “godless Communism.”

About the Nazi/socialist/flag connections… You might be on better footing if you researched whether or not the pledge affected Benito Mussolini rather than Hitler. The Italian fascists were already doing a similar thing, and they associated it with ancient Rome. As anyone might guess, the Germans claimed that Germans did it first: at the installation of ancient Germanic kings. From their perspective, if Roman rulers were actually migrants from Northern Europe, then the Romans stole it from Germany!

Some propagandists used photos of people saluting the US flag this way, and just cut out the flag in order to make it appear that they were Nazis. Incidentally, use of the salute has been forbidden by law in Germany for political use since World War II. The salute is also still used by some Palestinian and Arab militant groups - that might be worth more research.

On mystical symbols, including the swastika, there is of course much history and even more speculation. It is such an ancient symbol that its true origins are pretty much lost in time - it even predates the ancient Egyptian symbol, the Ankh - and it appears all over the world. The alphabet has nothing to do with it, although perhaps some socialists may have picked up the symbol for their own purposes. I don’t know, but it’s possible. The dollar sign is picked up that way, as in Bu$h. Have fun - there is a lot of great stuff to explore, but none of it is very pertinent to the topics of the flag or with socialist, fascist or Nazi movements in America. If anything, it’s a little strange that fundamentalists would be so fond of the flag and the pledge.

Are you actually Rex Curry? Or perhaps someone sort of randomly cutting and pasting from his editorials? He may have above-the-ordinary reasons for telling his community college students not to quote Wikipedia. Anyway, I don’t really see any evidence that he could be considered either a “historian” or a “noted symbologist.”

Claims to authority aren’t really the best way to argue, but if you are going to rely on them, you should pick credible authorities…

Jehovah’s Witnesses are a doomsday destructive cult who exploit and prey on our fears.Their core dogma is that Jesus had his second coming already in 1914 and is working ‘invisibly’ through their Watchtower organization.

They ‘trash’ all other religions because the ‘other’ religions have rejected this (false) Watchtower claim.

The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Jehovah’s Witnesses is like the Enron corporation of the secular world and their leaders should all be held accountable for fraud.

Yes,former employees/followers are speaking out against them LOUDLY.

Watchtower LIE and people DIE

“To accept another only if he/she precisely mirrors your ideals is to love them only for the reflection that you see of yourself.”

Yes - nicely put.

Tinny Ray: I’ll do a little research of my own on the flag issue. My understanding at this point is that the Nazi salute may have been inspired partly by the pledge, but I need to look into it further. At first glance, it seems much closer to the Roman salute (i.e. “Hail Caesar”). I think the link to socialism and/or the occult are strange connections in the American setting, so I am very skeptical of some of your claims. Bellamy’s views were very interesting as I recall, particularly on history, and there are of course many kinds of socialism. I think that we are in agreement about the creepiness of the ritual, but the US is not the only country obsessed with flag waving, pledges of loyalty, and other nationalistic rituals (nor the worst).

JR: Yes, there are some strange connections in Tinny Ray’s comments. Could you be more specific about what you think is the agenda here? The image you invoke of armed JWs at the door is powerfully funny. I had in my own mind a comic drawing.

Tengrain: Glad you stopped in to visit and read the post. The tagline is in homage to BOTH the author Burroughs and the performance artist Anderson. My dissertation was a discourse analysis of how viruses are imagined in contemporary fiction. It’s how the site was named as well, because all I could think of were viruses - and I became a “VirusHead.”

The Nazis inserted the word “socialist” as a sop to ordinary Germans, who were (at the time) attracted to socialist ideals. There is plenty of factual documentation (from Hitler and others) to back this up-I’m not even going to put a link up here because it’s a well-known truth. What Tinny is describing is not socialism, as we all know-what Ray decribes is a melding of Corporation, Church, and Government. This melding is Benito Mussolini’s own definition of Fascism. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco operated their countries as a combination of the three afrementioned forces. The Nazis were not socialists-they were Facsists with a racial taint.

Dominionists are sometimes Fascists, and sometimes Nazis. The Christian Identity folks are, for the most part, Nazis in philosophy, and they honor Hitler as one of the leading lights of their own movement. The other Dominionists generally fall under the accepted definition of Fascists.

And I am going to work on a pilot script for “When Jehova’s Witnesses Attack.” I am envisioning a knock on the door with one hand, while the other hand holds a bullwhip, or a machinegun