One of the most revealing signs of dementia is the complete loss of one’s memory. This condition disrupts one’s knowledge of the past and understanding of one’s self and the world, bringing about a terrible identity crisis.
The loss of American memory plays a similar role in the face of persistent revisionist attacks on our nation’s history and values. These attacks make use of false flags and decoys to create a national identity crisis, a manufactured state of national dementia.
I want to clear some of the smoke that has been used to stoke the current political divide in the hopes of countering this poisonous rhetoric, to present our nation’s true legacy on this Memorial Day, lest we forget it.
In an attempt to gain power, propagandists often try to have us remember our forefathers in a misguided, anachronistic, and retroactive light: They were solely enslavers.
But let us not forget the American Revolution, where at least 3 percent of the largely poor populace fought as militiamen under George Washington to defend our nation’s borders against the mightiest army the world had ever known.
They did so for survival, of course, but also out of a desire to forge a more perfect union and to write a social contract for its people (not the government), aspiring to uphold the most significant freedoms ever known.
Meanwhile, the above-mentioned propagandists — in an attempt to gain wealth — not only will ignorantly point out that the United States has a unique position in the history of slavery but also will demand monetary forms of reparations.
And let us not forget the Civil War, which addressed the inequalities left unaddressed in the Constitution, but which was also a fight between the South and the North over the issue of slavery, with horrific results.
It was an American tragedy of barbaric proportions — 600,000 corpses were a testimony to brother-on-brother bloodshed. There were more fatalities than the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined.
Who will pay these reparations?
Finally, World War II has less low-hanging fruit for revisionism but still attempts to match America with Nazis as equal in their imperialism and invasion power. There needs to be only one point for recall.
In 1939, when the war began, America had less than 200,000 soldiers enlisted. The Nazis in 1939 had over 4 million and, by the end of the war, had amassed an army of nearly 8 million soldiers. Let us not forget Normandy, when America would heroically step in to save our former British enemies; it was a new war against tyranny in the form of the Third Reich wielding power like the kings of old.
And yet a new Soviet empire would emerge from the battles left unsettled during the two world wars, and a new form of totalitarianism in Communist Russia would roll up on our shores with a new scheme.
The American legacy was always safe as long as it could be protected against a clear and present danger. But today, its enemies fight in the most insidious ways. They fight unseen and underground, working to distort public memory at every turn.
They want to remove the ground on which we stand, the surety with which we hold on to certain virtues, values, and principles. I mentioned dementia above, literally meaning to “move away from the mind”: We can’t fight for a purpose if we cannot agree, even roughly, on what it is.
As imperfect a union as we are — and that’s just fine for a union of human beings — the American purpose yet remains intact despite its fading memory.
To erase the moments of tremendous sacrifice that can sustain in times of great adversity is to erase the core narrative of the American experiment and to replace it with a simple one: a paranoid quest to gain power and influence and start a new, pessimistic story.
As we learned on 9/11, we must add to Churchill’s great command to fight our enemies on the beaches and on the land, and fight them in cyberspace and the classrooms. We must fight them on our children’s phones! We never surrender!
Broadly speaking, Americans could never be defeated via a direct, external confrontation, nor could they be brought to their knees via direct political means — no policies jeopardizing democracy or freedom would fully see the light of day.
Still, weary and low on resources, many Americans now feel they are losing a war for the soul of their nation. They cannot fight back against the recent onset of woke ideology, a way of thinking infiltrating American schools and institutions through both social and traditional media.
A contagion that undermines traditional family values and does away with religious values, though it is happy to infuse a new secular neo-liberalist religion as well.
Moreover, the new war combines all three conflicts mentioned. Like good old King George, the invisible enemy demands obedience; like the Civil War, it divides Americans and erases any unified notion of “the people”; and like World War II, it seeks the erosion of our republic.
Many of us want what Americans have always sought: low taxes, safe borders, and constitutional freedoms maintained by a deep reverence for Western, Enlightenment-based ideals and Judeo-Christian moral values. The common denominator seems to have always been life itself, or the ability to live a life of relative freedom in peace — and it looks very much like this is at risk.
Let us remember, lest we lose our legacy in forgetting Calvary, where I bow my head today with all Americans and especially with our current and fallen soldiers.
Robert Orlando, B.F.A., School of Visual Arts, is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and entrepreneur who founded Nexus Media. His latest book and film is The Shroud: Face to Face, to be in bookstores in the fall and theaters in the winter of 2023. He is completing his graduate degree at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he resides.
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