Carl Wells Books

I have listed seventeen disasters in U.S. history. Now it is time to try to come up with several morals to all this. I will offer six that I can see.

1/Despite all the disasters, we are still here. We’re alive. Most of us have decent health. We can work, provide for our families. We have a large measure of freedom. The disasters were real, but they have not ended life in the U.S. They ended lots of individual lives at home and abroad, yes, but life itself has not been ended. We can think and act in the present and in the future. What I am not saying is, “See, we can overcome disasters and still be a great country. We’re still the greatest country in the world, and will continue to be so.” No, the United States is finished. Stick a fork in it. There will be no reuniting of the country. I think the republic died in 1861. Then the country died in 1973, when it was decided that it was okay to kill unborn children. The empire . . . well, the empire has not died yet. But that death is coming. No, I am not saying that we can shrug off these disasters and still be a great country. But we as individuals, families, and churches are still here, still alive, and still capable of functioning. God is still real, and still good. We can have hope, and can have a giggle or three as we go along.

2/What is chiefly striking about the seventeen disasters is that they were all avoidable. We could have made different choices in how we thought and acted, and had we made those different choices we could have avoided the disasters. We could have not had a “Civil War.” We could have stayed out of World War I, to the benefit not only of ourselves but also to the benefit of world history. We could have refused to permit 61,000,000 unborn children be murdered. And on and on, through all seventeen disasters.

Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. That, at least, is what we are constantly told. That implies, “Yeah, sure, you can see that it was a disaster now. Big deal. Where were you when we had to make a decision?” Well, I want to speak up in defense of hindsight. I think hindsight gets a bad press, and very much undeservedly so. A key fact about hindsight which we don’t seem to appreciate is that hindsight allows us to look back in quietness and calmness and see where we went wrong. That is, we can see if we are willing to open our eyes and look. We should have been able to see that dumping the Articles of Confederation for the Constitution had been a serious error. But most of us don’t see it. We are not taking advantage of hindsight’s offering to us. “No thanks. You’re too late to do us any good.” No, we could have and should have learned from hindsight. Our intervention in World War I was one of the most foolish acts any country has committed, and it has had devastating effects on world history. If we could have seen that and admitted it, we could have avoided making the same mistake in World War II and in subsequent foolish wars. Anywhere along the line, hindsight offered to be our friend. Nope. We refused to listen. But we don’t have to keep on living like that. Hindsight, thank you for trying to help us. It’s not your fault we have ignored you.

3/Another thing we have learned from all this is that our capacity for self-deception is almost infinite. We call disasters triumphs. Abraham Lincoln is a hero to many of us. He “saved the union.” No, he ended the republic. He is the most disastrous person in U.S. history. But somehow even most conservatives and Christians still manage to consider Abraham Lincoln a great and good man, and we consider the idiotic war by which he ended the republic to be a great historic triumph of goodness. Look at all seventeen of the disasters. They are celebrated as wonderful by huge numbers of people. Our self-deception is so immense that the only reasonable explanation is that mankind as a whole (not just U.S. citizens) bathes in self-deception, luxuriates in self-deception, has its being in self-deception. Fyodor Dostoyevsky said man is “the ungrateful biped” (Notes from Underground), and he was correct. But we might also call man “the biped which lies to itself.” And is ungrateful, of course. But our self-deception seems equally prominent in our character.

4/Secession is part of the answer. We don’t have to go on like this. It is impossible that people so opposed in their definition of good/evil can get along over the long haul. Let the baby-killers have most of the country. We can have our small Neanderthal enclaves of Christian idiocracy, and if we can’t make it on our own we will come crying to momma and beg you to take us back on whatever terms you decide.

But secession is only 3% to 5% of the answer. It is a start only. Anyone walking the Appalachian Trail does not celebrate unduly because he walked the first mile successfully. The first mile is an excellent start! But the goal is to go 2,190 miles, over many days. Secession is a start. But the goal is to build a country which honors God and allows people to live in freedom and responsibility over centuries and even over millennia. Secession is the first day on the Appalachian Trail. If we make it the first day, that does not mean we will make it all the way.

5/One thing we learn from viewing all these disasters is that thoughtful, honorable people of high integrity are very rare. People that spoke up against the looming disasters were always few, and correspondingly precious. And that is going to be our problem in the present and in the future. Again, this is like the problem with self-deception–it is a universal fact of reality that truly thoughtful, principled, brave people are very rare. A Ron Paul is rare. An Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is rare. The rest of us are not likely to attain to the heights of those men. But we need to climb as high as we can. We need not be fools. We can improve our ability to think God’s thoughts after Him. We need to be very intentional in seeking to become more of what God would have us to be. We may have little influence in our churches, but perhaps we can have influence among our family and friends. The warfare for Christian civilization is ongoing, and every soldier, even the lowest private, is needed and important. Informed, thoughtful, brave, honest, principled privates are not to be shrugged off as unimportant, because they are not unimportant. They are important. We need every one.

6/One sad moral which forces itself upon us from looking at the seventeen disasters in U.S. history, is that our brand of Christianity is the root cause of our problems. Our Christianity is not very Christian. “There’s no there there,” as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland. As dark as this truth is, there is a flip side which should encourage us hugely. That is, a wise applied Christianity would have permitted us to avoid these seventeen disasters. We weren’t ready with wisdom, but that was not the fault of God the Father, of His Christ, or of the Holy Spirit. If we had read God’s word the Bible, and had been ready to apply it, we could have thought His thoughts after Him. And our actions would have permitted us to avoid the disasters, to the benefit of countless millions of people at home and abroad.

There is other good news. Our brand of Christianity stinks, but nevertheless for many people our Christianity is real. Perhaps 70% of professing Christians have never been converted, but still that would leave 30% of us who are believers, and we have tremendous potential for good. Most of the Christians I know have barely begun to scratch the surface of their potential ability to think and act with biblical wisdom.

So by all means we have to give up the continuing self-deception that American Christians currently frolic in from dusk to dawn, that our Christianity is powerful and wonderful. No, our Christianity stinks, and it is the reason our country has done so much evil. But as we honestly face our lazy wickedness, we should take heart that our potential for good is very high if only we decide to obey God from the heart.

That concludes our discussion of seventeen U.S. disasters, and of the morals we can draw from pondering those disasters.

I will conclude by predicting that we will have one more disaster. We may have more than one, of course. The country may stay around long enough to have several more disasters before the end comes. But one final disaster, somewhere along the line, seems to me to be almost certain. That will be the disaster which leads to the break-up of the United States.

That disaster will have to be big. Almost nobody is going to be ready psychologically to leave the U.S. until the warfare/welfare state fails in some extremely visible fashion. The failure is going to have to be very big. As long as the welfare checks keep coming (public education and Social Security are included in the category of welfare) and we keep eating without too much trouble, no one (except a nutcase or two like me) is going to be willing to see the country break up. So it is going to have to be something big. Perhaps a bomb which kills tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Perhaps a losing war in which we lose many thousands quickly. Perhaps hyperinflation which wipes out everything we own. Perhaps something else. But it will have to be big. People in this country are still not in a hurry to see the U.S. end. Which shows practical wisdom, because the devil we know may be better than the devil we don’t know. While I want the U.S. to cease to be one huge powerful irresponsible country, I know that the way the U.S. ends could be very painful for me. It could mean the loss of my savings, or it might mean starvation, or death by violence.

Reality exists, however. The U.S. has been acting in such a way as to call down God’s further judgment. That means something big is coming, whether we like it or not. I hope I’m still living on the other side, and that I can be among those who help rebuild Christian civilization. But if I am too dead to help with that, the Bible seems to teach that God will find a way to build His kingdom on earth somewhere. Why not on a part of the North American continent?

We are looking at seventeen disasters in U.S. history. We are trying to put in perspective the disaster of Biden/Harris becoming president and vice-president. Whether or not the election was stolen–personally, I think it was–the elevation of these two people to our highest offices is a disaster. As the next four years will prove, I think. But we’ll see. We are ready for disaster number 11.

11/The Vietnam War 1960?-1973. This cost us 58,000 dead, countless wounded, and untold treasure. For a losing war. If it had been a winning war, that would have been very little better. Perhaps even no better at all. Vietnam is not our country. If countries insist on going communistic, that is their decision. Communism won’t work–ask the Soviet Union, ask Red China–but hey, knock yourself out. How would we feel if Russia, China, or Canada said, “We think you people in the U.S. are going down a very wrongheaded path with your politics, therefore we are going to come into your country and straighten things out.” They would be correct that we are going down a wrongheaded path. But that is our problem. We would be furious at the military intervention of Russia, China, or Canada, in our country. We are not their business. Neither was Vietnam our business. It cost us many dead and crippled, to do something that should never have been done.

12/The Great Society 1965-present. It is built into the way mankind is wired that we flourish best as people when we work to provide for ourselves. You can blame God for this, or you can blame the universe, but it remains a fact. Once you start taking away the personal responsibility to earn a living, you start to ruin the people you are supposedly “helping.” You are not helping them; you are destroying their ability to function wisely in the world. This does not mean that all charitable giving is foolish and counterproductive. But charitable giving has to be done voluntarily and with careful practical wisdom, or it can backfire. A welfare state in which non-workers are financed by tax money extorted from workers at the point of a gun is not charity, and it is not wise, and it destroys the recipients. This of course does not mean the underclass are the only people being corrupted. Medicare, Social Security, public education at any level, farm subsidies, unemployment compensation–all these are aspects of the Great Society’s attack on personal responsibility. Of course some of these programs started well before 1965. But the Great Society only intensified the desire of most of us to live at the expense of other people. Almost everyone is now a thief at heart. Sounds like something called communism, doesn’t it?

13/End of gold standard, 1971-present. We don’t have any backing for our dollars. They are printed out of thin air. Why not print up a lot, and pass them out? We’ll all be rich! Well, maybe. This is not going to end well. Inflation (the increase in the money supply via dollars backed by nothing) gradually impoverishes those who work for a living. As a nation we are already bankrupt. When we discover that, it may be a hard landing for most of us. Dishonest money comes about because we have dishonest hearts. Do I detect a pattern here?

14/Roe v. Wade abortion decision, 1973-present. This is not rocket science. You can’t go around killing babies, and expect to get away with it. You kill 61,000,000 babies, and there are bad consequences. A country willing to kill its children, is a country committed to ending itself. It is a country not worth preserving. It is a country made up of self-absorbed, hard-hearted people. Children can be annoying, and difficult to take care of. Sometimes they are noisy, and sometimes they are sticky after tea, as one of E. F. Benson’s characters might say. But anyone who doesn’t like children need not make them. If you make them, it is not a practical solution to the inherent problem of their existence, to kill them. You wouldn’t go down to the local school and kill fifty children because they are sticky after tea. And you would be upset if some screwball did that, as some screwball occasionally does to great national anger. Then why would we permit the murder of 61,000,000 unborn children who probably would have proven to be sticky after tea if they had been born? We do it because we are totally nuts.

15/Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq 2001-present. Here we go again. Well, it is hardly worth complaining about. So far we’ve lost only about 6,700 killed. That is basically a rounding error from zero. Unless you happen to be one of the ones killed, or the family of one of the ones killed. Or one of the people in Afghanistan or Iraq killed. Or their family. Or someone crippled by the wars, rather than killed, whether you are from the U.S. or from Afghanistan or Iraq. Of course these wars have also cost a lot of money. But these wars have brought great benefits to the U.S., for example . . . okay, give me a little time here. There must have been benefits. Okay, I thought of one! We have been able to introduce transgender bathrooms to Afghanistan and Iraq, which otherwise would be so backward as never to consider having such a thing. We have in that fashion and no doubt in many others brought the blessings of “our democracy” to these backward people. So maybe these wars were not such a disaster after all.

16/The bailout of 2008. A thoughtful commentator who goes by the name of Bionic Mosquito has pointed out how in 2008 the calls by ordinary Americans were running highly against the potential bailout. The percentage of us opposed was through the roof. But it didn’t matter. Congress ignored us. They did what they wanted. The fix was in. So $787 billion was passed out, in typical crony capitalism style, to the in crowd. It is hard for us to process such numbers. But it is a lot of money. I did the math for one chapter of my book Getting Ready for Secession in 2016, and I figured out that if that $787 billion had been spread out among the 305,000,000 people in the U.S. (rough estimate at the time), each of us would have been bailed out to the tune of $2,580.00. I don’t know about you, but I would have felt bailed out to receive such a check. I was not advocating such a passing out of free money; it would have been very foolish to send out such checks. But at least each one of us would have received some personal benefit from such a bailout. No, instead the money went to corporate welfare recipients. The major point is: Congress is a complete disaster. We knew it before 2008, but they proved it conclusively with their bailout bill. How can any country survive when the political Powers That Be are completely corrupt?

17/The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. These are people at enmity with Christian morality. Such enmity has been building in our elite class for a long time, but Mr. Biden and Mrs. Harris seem to be a further step in the direction of Satan. They hate Christians, but most of all they hate God. They have no good principles. Their only principles are to do the most wrongheaded thing they can think of among the ideas recommended by the most left-wing of their supporters. As I write, we are beginning the second day of the rule of Biden/Harris. Well, at least it should be interesting.

Those are seventeen disasters the U.S. has experienced. Each one was serious–is serious, because they continue to have consequences.

I promised to give several morals at the end. I hope to do that next week in the concluding segment of this series.

Last week we began discussing disasters in U.S. history. This was prompted by the fact that Biden/Harris will take office on January 20, 2021. Many of us believe that the Nov. 3, 2019 election was stolen. But assume for the sake of argument that the election was as pure as the driven snow. In either case, their elevation to office is a disaster. These are thoughtless and irresponsible people, baby-killers. Even before they take office, we can easily see these are bad, bad people, and that their effect on our national life is almost certain to be horrific.

But disasters are commonplace in U.S. history. So far we have looked at only three. We’re ready to examine number 4.

4/The Spanish-American War (1898)/The Philippine-American War (1899-1902). We will lump these two wars together, since the first sort of led to the second, and they happened very quickly, back to back. The U.S. had always shown an unhealthy interest in what other countries were doing. (Example: the Monroe Doctrine, 1823.) But these two wars showed that we were ready to put our great goodness to the task of beginning to run the world. A generation after the so-called Civil War, we had recovered to the point that we were fat, sassy, prosperous–and full of urine and vinegar and righteousness. We would cheerfully take the beam out of our neighbor’s eye. Please, don’t thank us. Just be grateful that we exist and that we know how other countries should be organized. We had moved completely into our empire stage–a stage we have never left, and probably never will leave until we cease to exist as a nation. For which, stay tuned.

5/Federal income tax ratified, 1913. Once you give the national government the ability to tax its citizens at any level to be determined by the ones doing the taxing, in order to fund programs of undetermined nature but almost certain to be bad, you have opened us up for disaster. They confiscate what they want. You don’t approve of a high percentage of the things they do with this confiscated money? Tough toe-nails. They are going to do those things anyway, without your approval–but very much with the money you unwillingly provide.

6/The Federal Reserve created, 1913-14. The elite can be trusted to do what is best for all of us, of course. Well, maybe not. Maybe they do what is best for them, and we take the consequences. For an in-depth discussion of how the Federal Reserve came to exist, and what that means for us, please see The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, by G. Edward Griffin. Since 1913-14, the dollar has lost approximately 95 to 97% of its value. That value will continue to drop.

7/World War I 1917-18 (U.S. involvement). Europe was involved in a suicidal war. It was our privilege to look on in horror. No, that wasn’t good enough for the second most disastrous man in U.S. history, Woodrow Wilson (edged out only by Abraham Lincoln). He yearned to straighten out Europe and the entire world. Clearly he and his fellow Americans had the wisdom to do this! So, instead of WW I coming to a natural end, with the possibility that the exhausted European participants would take time to think about what they had done and maybe, just maybe, plan never to do it again, Wilson got us into the war. He was killed in battle, dying bravely on the Western Front. Oh no, wait, it wasn’t him, it was 53,000 of his fellow citizens. They died so that World War I could turn into the bigger and better World War II only about 21 years later. Wilson’s involvement in making the Treaty of Versailles was–of course–disastrous. The world has never recovered from World War I. The recovery would have been incredibly difficult even if we had stayed out of the war, because the war was first of all a symptom of Europe having turned its back on biblical Christianity. The millions of dead were only the consequence; the root cause was that our civilization (including the U.S.) had turned its back on biblical ways of thinking. We made everything much worse by our foolish and harmful entry into the war.

8/The New Deal 1933-1938?. This was an horrific lurch leftward, away from freedom and responsibility, and toward fascist/communist bossing other people around. Franklin Roosevelt was the leader, but he had lots of help.

9/World War II 1941-45 (U.S. involvement). Wait, this wasn’t really our fault, right? Japan attacked us, and we had to defend ourselves. Well, only sort of. In fact Franklin Roosevelt (again with lots of help) was eager to get us into war on the side of the Allies. We poked Japan foolishly, with our policies. Once again we would straighten the world out. If that meant we had to go to war to teach other people how they should behave, so be it. We lost about 405,000 killed, about 671,000 wounded and crippled. We helped win the war, but somehow or other we and Europe have managed to lose the peace–even after the Soviet Union disbanded in 1991, which should have made winning the peace a piece of cake.

10/The Korean War 1950-53. About 36,000 more of our people dead, in another chapter in our attempt to run world history. How come it seems like every time the elite people running our country want to do good by running world history, tens of thousands of our ordinary people end up dead, while the elite people never end up dead? Do I detect a pattern here?

Well, we still have a few more disasters to go, but I will pick this up again next week, Lord willing.

Well, to the total surprise of just about no one, it seems that the Biden/Harris coup d’etat engineered by the Democratic Party and their familiars is going to be successful. It seems clear to the meanest intelligence that the election was stolen outright. The Democrats planned ahead this time (unlike 2016), and with the media completely unwilling to smell a rat–with pencils intentionally shoved up their noses to make sure they couldn’t smell anything at all–and unwilling even to consider trying to find out the truth, the actual winner of the election (Donald Trump) will be sent packing in a couple weeks.

This is a disaster of great consequence. If Biden/Harris actually won the election fairly, it would still be a disaster, because these are two of the least principled people the U.S. has ever put in high office–and the competition for that honor is very fierce. But of course it is much more of a disaster if elections mean nothing and from now on the Deep State simply appoints the winner ahead of time. Which, admittedly, might be simpler and easier.

So, whoever actually won, we have a disaster. We have a worse disaster if the election has been stolen, as it seems obvious that it was. Here is one summary, by Paul Craig Roberts, which shows how stolen the election was:

The Proof Is In: The Election Was Stolen

But the point I want to make in this space is that the U.S. and A. (to use L’il Abner’s name for us) has had lots of disasters in our history. Disaster is nothing new. Disaster is commonplace, routine, and by now should be expected–although we are usually surprised, and moreover we have a knack for calling disaster a wonderful success. Which does not keep disaster from really being disaster.

So what I would like to do in this space is list seventeen disasters in U.S. history, in the order in which they happened. These are just the major disasters. No doubt we could name dozens of other disasters which we might call minor. And I would not be shocked to discover that I have failed to note one or several major disasters, just because I have not been paying attention enough.

At the end I will give the moral of the story. Oh, what the heck! I’m feeling generous; I’ll give several morals at the end.

Some of these disasters you may have been used to considering as triumphs rather than disasters. And perhaps our unwillingness to see disaster as disaster is the biggest disaster of all, and why we keep on having more disasters. But feel free to disagree with me on what is a disaster and what is a triumph. Think for yourself.

Statistics given are rounded off and open for argument, if argument is something you enjoy. I don’t particularly enjoy arguing, myself. I am trying to give the big picture here. Exact accuracy on numbers is going to be incredibly difficult to come by. I admire exact accuracy, but I likely won’t have it. Please be patient.

So anyway, here are seventeen disasters in U.S. history, in historical order. (It’s one d— thing after another, as Bertie Wooster would say–censored slightly for a family blog.)

1/The American Revolutionary War. This cost us 8,000 combat deaths, 17,000 other deaths, for a total of 25,000 deaths, and many additional wounded. (One might also mourn for the British dead and wounded, if one had a tender heart–most of the British were just ordinary saps like the rest of us.) We won our “freedom”–which means we won increased taxation far above what we were paying under British rule.

Canada and Australia managed to become their own separate countries (still in the British Commonwealth, of course) with violent revolutions costing 36,000 and 42,000 death respectively . . . oh wait, I guess that didn’t happen. They became their own separate countries with no violent revolutions at all. It seems certain that the U.S. also could have become its own country without violent revolution, if we had simply waited for circumstances to lift us to “freedom.” No doubt we would have proven just as able to be ridiculous as Canada and Australia are proving themselves to be–but all without warfare.

25,000 dead is a pittance, of course. Except it wasn’t really, at the time. One website said that the American Revolutionary War cost us 1% of our population at the time. Picture that in 2021 terms. If we are a nation of 320,000,000 (approximately), 1% of our population lost to warfare would be 3,200,000. That is a lot of dead people. It’s actually about eight times as many dead as we lost during the entire time of World War II. Then picture perhaps another 6,400,000 wounded, sometimes crippled. (Not to mention the unlamented British dead and wounded and crippled. Oops, I guess I just mentioned them. Sorry.)

The American Revolution was a disaster–our first, but far from our last. We were just warming up.

2/The American Constitution. The Articles of Confederation were ratified by the thirteen states in March of 1781, late in the American Revolution. The Articles arranged for a very limited central government, with most authority remaining with the individual states. That was one of the smartest things we’ve ever done. So immediately, within about six years, we threw out the Articles, and replaced them with the Constitution.

The Biden/Harris coup d’etat was not the first coup in U.S. history. The first took place when the founding fathers pretended they were going to revise the Articles of Confederation, and instead threw them out and whacked out the Constitution (as Huck Finn might say). Lots and lots of people at the time knew it was a mistake, a disaster, something that was going to cause endless misery down the road. Such people were and are called anti-federalists. They said what they suspected would happen, loud and clear and voluminously. Surprise, surprise–they were right. But hey, it’s only 240 or so years. We’ll figure this out eventually. Just give us a little time.

The Constitution meant that we are much, more more of a centrally organized nation than the Articles had permitted us. Given human nature in regard to holding power, what could possibly go wrong? Only everything. With the Constitution, the days of the republic were numbered.

3/The Civil War. Otherwise known by many names, including The War to End the Republic of the United States and Replace it With an Empire. (Okay, I made that up just now, but it fits.) The South had a perfect right to secede. Hate them if you want to, because they held slaves, but don’t insult your own intelligence by claiming that they had no right to secede.

Secession runs in our blood. (And it should; it should run in everybody’s blood.) Go back to 1776. We seceded. It was foolish in that case, and it led to a war which should not have been fought, but we wanted to secede–and if we could not do it peacefully we insisted on doing it violently. No state would have signed on for the Constitution if they thought they were giving up their right to be a state all by themselves. Organizing as one country seemed to offer advantages to the individual states, but no honest person would claim that signing up to join the United States under the Constitution was the end of all history with secession never ever again permitted.

The South had a right to secede. The North had a right to secede. The North should have been glad to get rid of the crackers. But led by the most disastrous man in U.S. history, Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. refused to allow the South their right to go their own way. The South in turn was too eager to go to war.

This cost a total of about 655,000 dead. Again we ignore the wounded, the crippled, and the blinded. (Quit bringing your whining around here, wounded and crippled and blinded.) We ignore the physical destruction of property. We ignore the rapes. Just count the dead. One website said this was 2.1 percent of the population at the time. That translates to 6,720,000 dead if we lost that many dead in 2021 terms.

All for what? To end the republic once and for all, to make the U.S. an empire without humility or self-restraint.

Could slavery not have been phased out gradually, without violence? Of course it could. That happened in countless places around the globe. It is only the U.S. where the Powers That Be insisted on a violent war to end slavery. They got the end of slavery, all right–or at least the end of one form of slavery. But they got it at an exorbitant cost which they need not have paid.

If God had wanted to devastate the South because their form of slavery was unbiblical, He could have been trusted to do that in His own timing. Being smarter than God, the North took vengeance on the South–and slaughtered their own people in the process, along with ending the republic once and for all. Maybe it might have been smarter to wait for God, meanwhile seeking non-violent means of ending slavery. It’s just a thought.

We will stop there for today, and plan on picking this up again next week. So far we have discussed only three of the seventeen major disasters the U.S. has inflicted on itself. So we have a bunch to go.