The following letter appeared in yesterday’s Opelika-Auburn News:
To the editor:
Jim Evans is quite right to point out Saturday that the founders (well, most of them) would not have approved of the insertion of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. (Some of the founders would probably have had a problem with “indivisible” as well.)
But he omits the still more important fact that most of the founders would not have approved of any Pledge of Allegiance at all, with or without such phrases.
The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by the nationalist socialist Francis Bellamy. The term “allegiance” refers to the duty of obedience and subordination that medieval serfs owed to their feudal lord – their “liege.”
The American founders, by contrast, waged and won a revolution against the Old World idea that we owe allegiance to our governments; the United States was founded on the opposite principle, that our governments owe allegiance to us.
The founders would have been horrified to learn that two centuries after the American Revolution, schoolchildren would be forced to recite loyalty oaths to the government. The Pledge of Allegiance is one of the most blatantly un-American documents ever written.
Roderick T. Long
For a previous post on the pledge, see here.
Bravo. I was in an argument of sorts not too long ago about programming and indoctrination in our school system. People just didn’t want to see it; I finally had to resort to an example.
There were 5 people other than me present, so I asked them if any could recite the quadratic equation (or what it is used for). Or the year the Magna Charta was signed? What was Sri Lanka called before it was called Sri Lanka? What’s a gerund? One person got “Ceylon” out of the whole thing. Then I asked them to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Of course, all 5 could do so.
Wow Sapper, that’s a really clever talking point. I’ll have to remember to use that sometime.
The Pledge of Allegiance was the origin of the nazi salute too. Francis Bellamy and Edward Bellamy were national socialists and influenced the National Socialist German Workers Party, its rituals, symbols and dogma. See the work of the historian Dr. Rex Curry (author of “Pledge of Allegiance Secrets”).
They have you take a pledge allegiance over over 1800 times and never tell you what it is.
Hell, even the people, both liege and serf who knew what allegiance was would scoff at the pledge, because it has an inanimate object and a legal fiction in place of a liege. “OMG! you promised to serve a piece of cloth!”
The whole Calvin was was about this; in fide non ficta . There is /may be nothing imagined in allegiance. A feudal system requires and oath actually given to a natural person who is the liege.