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The Ideals of the 4th of July

Posted by Randy on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 7:30:39 PM
  

Here's a perfect thing to get for the 4th of July holiday: my book We Hold These Truths. It's about the Declaration of Independence and how leaders have appealed to its ideals throughout our history. Get it for your family, your friends, your enemies (maybe they'll become your friends). Shameless plug, but what can I say the Fourth is my favorite secular holiday, and I like the author's take on the subject:

Two central beliefs in the Declaration of Independence have greatly shaped the United States and formed it into a country that is a beacon of liberty throughout the world. The first influential belief is that there is a providential God Who presides over the affairs of this world, and the second is that God has granted man inalienable rights. Leaders like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower have appealed to these beliefs during some of the nation's most trying and defining moments, including the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. Unfortunately, these founding and sustaining visions are in danger of being lost today as indicated by the polarization over basic issues like the definitions of life and marriage. We Hold These Truths calls us to look back to the nation's foundational beliefs to regain vision for our day. 

Here are some key portions of the Declaration of Independence:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."  Contained in this first paragraph is the belief that God has set up certain ageless laws over all His Creation, "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God."  The second paragraph now states, more specifically, the rights that are derived from those laws, and it's the most recognized portion of the Declaration:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

The Declaration next lays out the grievances including among others: murdering colonists with impunity, shelling and burning coastal communities to the ground, disbanding local governments, levying taxes with no representation in Parliament, occupying Boston and imposing martial law, taking colonists captive and impressing them into military service, and charging colonists with crimes and shipping them back to England to be judged by people who were not their peers.

The Declaration closes stating a belief in the justice of the American cause and a belief in just God who would help them in the fight. 

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states;...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.  

May this 4th of July remind us all once again that our most basic rights come from God and that He, in His Providence, still governs over the affairs of this world. 
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North Korea: Was Gen. MacArthur Prophetic?

Posted by Randy on Friday, June 26, 2009 5:45:18 PM
  
   

"In war there is no substitute for victory."
General Douglas MacArthur – Speech to a Joint Session of Congress, 1951 

This week marks the 59th Anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War, and the rhetoric coming out of North Korea is enough to get anyone’s attention.  During these last few days, Kim Jong-il’s regime has threatened to wipe the United States from the globe if it seeks to enforce the UN sanctions blocking proliferation of the communist nation’s nuclear weapons. The regime followed this threat with the promise of raining a “fire shower of nuclear retaliation” if we take any form of military action against it.  Such belligerent statements by North Korea make General Douglas MacArthur warning regarding the dangers of appeasement offered during the Korean War appear extremely prophetic. 

In June of 1950, when the North launched its attack against South Korea, President Harry Truman responded by sending American troops to fight with the South.  All looked lost when the North’s forces surrounded the Americans and South Koreans on three sides with their backs to the sea centered around southeastern port city of Pusan.  General Douglas MacArthur, the World War II hero and newly named commander, conceived a plan to conduct a bold amphibious landing further up the peninsula behind the North Korean lines, thereby placing the enemy forces in a pincer between Allied units in both directions.  The plan worked masterfully, causing the North Korean forces to fall into full retreat.  The Allies managed to push what was left of the Korean Army north of the original border and kept on rolling. The goal was no longer to leave the Korean peninsula divided, as it had been prior to the conflict, but united as one country.   

China did not approve of this plan and responded by sending a force of over 1 million soldiers to the aid of the North Koreans.  They pushed the Allies back below the previous border between North and South.  In order to fight this new war MacArthur requested permission to: 1) bomb the Chinese Army’s staging areas north of the Korean border; 2) implement a naval blockade of China’s coast; and 3) allow the millions of exiled Chinese, living in present day Taiwan, to join on the Allied side.  President Truman, not wanting to widen the war, refused all three requests.  MacArthur came to quickly realize there was going to be no way for complete victory in the Korean War if all means of denying the enemy reinforcements and supplies were not going to be used.  In frustration, MacArthur began to publicly state what he believed was necessary to win and those pronouncements stood in direct opposition to President Truman’s plans to limit the fighting to the Korean peninsula.  When MacArthur persisted, Truman relieved him of his command. 

MacArthur returned to the United States to a hero's welcome with massive tickertape parades, as well as a request to speak to a joint session of Congress. The General took the occasion to warn the members of Congress and the country of the perils of not fighting the Korean War to win it.  He said, "There are some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They are blind to history’s clear lesson, for history teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier war. It points to no single instance where this end has justified that means, where appeasement has led to more than a sham peace.” The examples of the truce ending World War I, where 15 million died begetting another war with Germany leading to three times that number dying and, in more recent times, the Gulf Wars I and II bear out the General’s observation. MacArthur added leaving the aggressor in power ultimately, “Like blackmail…lays the basis for new and successively greater demands until, as in blackmail, violence becomes the only alternative.”


 

The President and the Congress did not follow General MacArthur’s advice in 1951. The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice leaving the aggressor Kim Song-il’s father, the dictator Kim Il-Jong, in power.  North Korea and China signed the truce, but the underlying issue leading to the war (the North's intention to make the entire peninsula a communist state) was never resolved.  As MacArthur predicted, the aggressor nation has employed blackmail tactics throughout the years to tune of tens of billions of dollars in aid being paid by South Korea, Japan and the United States. Despite all of it, the North has issued its most provocative threats to date, and conducted unsanctioned nuclear bomb and missile tests, which if allowed to continue, will place Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast in peril very soon. China appears content to wait on the sidelines and let crisis play out. The use of U.S. military strikes is rapidly becoming our only alternative. 
 
Fifty-eight years have passed since General MacArthur predicted the cost of leaving the North Korean regime in place. Short of some radical change in policy, North Korea will have to be opposed by force. We are left to pray that somehow history’s lesson can be circumvented and a full-scale war will not result.   

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Randy DeSoto is the author of the book We Hold These Truths, which addresses how leaders have appealed to beliefs found in the Declaration of Independence, throughout our nation's history. 

     
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