“These are times in which genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life or in the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart then these qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.”
..from a letter to John Quincy Adams from his mother. At the time he was a young boy on his 2nd trip to Europe with his father.
When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America in the early 19th century in his classicDemocracy in America, he was comparing America’s democracy to the declining norm in Europe: aristocracy.
The European aristocracy, a landed aristocracy, ruled with inheritance and privilege. Exclusionary guilds and inherited wealth kept a calcified social order lacking change and social mobility. Great wealth was to be expected only by those who had it.
“Once cherished, history is currently viewed as onerous- unless employed for social engineering. The results are political leaders who cannot weigh the consequences of their actions; journalists who confuse the exciting with the significant; military officers who view their profession through peepholes; and impassioned citizens easily misled. In place of history, we get hysterical headlines.”
“The blood-drunk killer is rarely disarmed by the man who lives in books- or by the eternal adolescent clinging to the lie that all men want peace.”
“Above all, history that adheres to facts inoculates the citizens against lies. ”
From Endless Wars by Ralph Peters
“The citizens of the United States do not stand apart from history. We are in it and of it. Many of our ancestors came here hoping to escape it, but history is a pack of bloodhounds. Desperate to put those persistent dogs off the scent, we embrace fantasies in preference to facts. When the baying grows too near, we succumb to superstitious rituals, chanting that peace is the natural order of things and behaving as if violence were a spook we might drive away with Ivy-League fetishes and bouts of self-flagellation.”
The opening paragraph of Endless Wars by Ralph Peters
“Abraham Mordecai-who, believing that the Indians were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. threw off the “yoke” of Jewish law, went native, and married an Indian girl- was actually the founding father of Montgomery, Alabama, cradle city of the Southern Confederacy.”
from Why are Jews Liberals by Norman Podhoretz
“Abraham (Abram Mordecai) settled in central Alabama by 1785 and established the state’s first cotton gin near Montgomery”. Jewish Virtual Library
“With the purging of Alabama’s native groups, more and more white settlers were struck with “Alabama Fever” and moved to Montgomery to take advantage of its strategic location on the Alabama River. By 1846, it was a thriving community and Mordecai’s original trading post became Alabama’s state capitol.”
“In 1847, Albert James Pickett a journalist from Montgomery, discovered Mordecai in a remote mountain cabin near Dudleyville. Mordecai in his old age had become increasingly eccentric, having built his own coffin on the floor next to his bed. Relishing the company of another human being, he told Pickett all about his life as a trader living among the strange, lost tribe of Israel. After that final interview, Mordecai died three years later at 99 years-old.He was buried in the coffin he built himself. The Montgomery Evening News proposed the construction of a monument to the Little Chief, who they deemed “the cradle rocker of Montgomery’s infancy.” The Daughters of the American Revolution erected a small plaque in Dudleyville that stands to this day.”
From The Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life
