Flag Day and the U.S. Army
Today is June 14th.
Some of you know it is Flag Day. And that’s cool. But there is something else important about this day.
On this day in 1775 the United States Army was created by legislative act of the 2nd Continental Congress. That’s the same Continental Congress that will declare to the world on July 4th, 1776 that ‘all men are created equal” and more specifically that:
These United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Thirteen months before we declared our independence, Congress created the United States Army.
Let that sink in.
The Army is older than the United States.
As an institution it has been fighting for you and me longer than we’ve been a country.
This is true also of the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corp created by acts of congress on October 14 and November 12,1775 respectively.
The military is older than the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution.
There is no real America without the military. Otherwise we are only an idea, an aspiration. A pretty fiction. It is the military, the blood of men that gives that idea the potential of becoming something real in a fallen world.
I think it is not too bold is say that America was conceived on this day. Not born. But conceived.
And this gets to a point, which I believe is lost too often in half-baked prattle between the libertarians on the right and the socialist left. And particularly right now, on Flag Day, when many are afraid to show the flag lest they be attacked or maligned.
Sovereignty is not merely a declaration of independence, a statement that you are free or entitled somehow to be left alone, a self-assertion of what ought to be. And conversely it is not that condition of rule that emerges from “the barrel of a gun” as Marxists and Antifa and Black Lives Matter assert.
Sovereignty is the careful and assiduous union of just law joined to the ability to enforce that law.
Had the thirteen colonies merely declared independence, without means of enforcing that independence, The United States of America would have never existed at all. It would have been an aspirational fiction dreamt up by Utopians.
And had it been forced into creation by an Army following a Julius Caesar or Mao, or formed by angry men with guns, America would be just another tawdry experiment in the will of despotism.
But America is, and remains a good place. Something we need to remember right now. An exception in the history of the world. We are here and powerful. And we remains so, in part because “… rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us.”
The enforcement of the sovereignty of the people is expressed legislatively through the creation of the military, and also, by the legal creation of police departments and other law enforcement agencies.
The destructive tantrums thrown by leftist agitators and anarchists in the streets of our cities, should sober us to the nature of sovereignty and law, and why force and the use of it is ultimately fundamental to the existence of any legitimate civil body.
In America, the people are sovereign. We the People. “We the people” is not a cute turn of phrase, it is the civil body through which laws are created, in a particular way, shaped expressly by a written, accessible Constitution of the United States and 50 state constitutions. It is through this sovereign civil body and ONLY through this civil mechanism of law-making and enforcement that the people speak. People who express themselves through destruction and lawlessness are called criminals. The people do not speak through riots and law breaking. They speak through law.
The US Army was created to give potency to the will of the people, as expressed through law. As is the National Guard.
The legal power to use force is fundamental to the rule of law. It is fundamental to the independence of states. It is the sine qua non of sovereignty. For without the ability to enforce law, there is, in effect, no law.
A nation or civil body incapable or afraid of enforcing its legal judgments is not sovereign.
The Continental Congress of 1775 understood this.
Do we?
