The Ordnungszelle Option

By Benjamin Welton

To Anglo-American ears, any German phrase can sound somewhat troubling, given the association between the German language and Nazism in the political arena. As such, Ordnungszelle may seem frightening. The word roughly translates to English as “cell of order.” The term came to life during the early years of the Weimar Republic.

It is the point of this article to support the cell of order ideal as possible alternative the urban and rural decay affecting parts of America. While far from a one-size-fits all solution, the cell of order praxis, along with its spirit of authority and discipline, could go a long way toward curing some of our modern ills. A cell of order government, which would begin and end at the local level (i.e. state, county, or municipal governance), would institute sweeping reforms designed to curb crime, strengthen private property rights, rid local society of filthy habits and degenerate “freedoms”, and create a truly conservative government that would be an alternative to the totalitarian and liberty-destroying ideologies of anarcho-communism, democratic socialism, national socialism, and individualistic democracy.

Weimar Chaos and Cell of Order Origins

To understand the origin and context of the term Ordnungszelle, let us begin with a refresher of events that happened in Deutschland before and after the declaration of an armistice on the eleventh hour of November 11, 1918. On October 28, 1,000 sailors of the Imperial Fleet mutinied and refused to carry out orders instructing them to leave the port of Wilhelmshaven. Soon thereafter, the mutinying sailors were joined by striking workers, thus paralyzing the German port city of Kiel. While many of the sailors revolted out of a mixture of exhaustion and boredom (the Imperial Navy had essentially been left idle at Wilhelmshaven and other German ports after the Battle of Jutland in 1916), the disturbance at Kiel was part of a larger political action. Karl Arteldt, one of the mutiny’s leaders, was a member of the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) who had earlier been imprisoned by military authorities in 1917. He, along with fellow USPD member Lothar Popp, convinced thousands of sailors and workers to take to the streets on November 3. Their march was met by armed soldiers, who at some point opened fire. Nine people were killed and twenty-nine were wounded.[1] By November 4, 40,000 sailors and workers were in control of Kiel.[2] The socialist nature of this rebellion became clear with the issuance of the “Fourteen Points” (patterned on US President Woodrow Wilson’s equally utopian Fourteen Points):

1. The release of all inmates and political prisoners.
2. Complete freedom of speech and the press.
3. The abolition of mail censorship.
4. Appropriate treatment of crews by superiors.
5. Exemption from punishment for comrades returning from ships and to the barracks.
6. The launching of the fleet is to be prevented under all circumstances.
7. Any defensive measures involving bloodshed are to be prevented.
8. The withdrawal of all troops not belonging to the garrison.
9. All measures for the protection of private property will be determined by the Soldiers’ Council immediately.
10. Superiors will no longer be recognized outside of duty.
11. Unlimited personal freedom of every man from the end of his tour of duty until the beginning of his next tour of duty.
12. Officers who declare themselves in agreement with the measures of the newly established Soldiers’ Council are welcome in our midst. All others have to quit their duty without entitlement to provision.
13. Every member of the Soldiers’ Council is to be released from any duty.
14. All measures to be introduced in the future can only be introduced with the consent of the Soldiers’ Council.

These demands are orders of the Soldiers’ Council and are binding for every military person.[3]

On November 7, Prince Maximilian of Baden, the Chancellor of the German Empire, met with Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democratic Party. These two men tried to convince Kaiser Wilhelm II to abdicate, even though the real power in Germany had been in the hands of General Erich Ludendorff and General Paul von Hindenburg since 1916.[4] On November 9, it was announced that the emperor had abdicated, even though Wilhelm had not yet agreed to abdication. In a mixture of euphoria and haste, the German Socialist Party (SPD), which had been the largest party in the German Reichstag before the war, declared the new German Republic in Berlin. At the same time, members of USPD, which had never forgiven the SPD for voting to support Germany’s war effort in 1914, were planning their own rebellion against legitimate authority.

On November 12, Ebert decided to end martial law in Germany. He and other members of the ruling SPD rushed through several pieces of legislation, getting German industrialists to agree to union rights and the right of collective bargaining. On December 16, the new SPD government also created an elective assembly. Eight days later, the “red army” from Kiel (rechristened as the People’s Naval Division) marched on Berlin and demanded their wages. Ebert called out the army, but the Kiel sailors won the day. This victory was due to two facts: 1) most of the German army just wanted to go home after four years of fighting in the trenches, and as such their enthusiasm for policing was nil; and 2) the People’s Naval Division was joined by the USPD’s Spartacist League, a pro-Bolshevik organization led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Another important Spartacist was Berlin police commissioner, Robert Eichhorn. Eichhorn armed the workers of Berlin on January 5, 1919. This led to weeks of fighting in Berlin and elsewhere between the “reds” and the newly created Freikorps.[5]

The story of the Freikorps has already been covered at Zeroth Position here. Suffice it to say that Ebert and Noske, two law-and-order politicians who supported the monarchy and the army, created the Freikorps out of necessity. Within less than a year, the Freikorps had won the war against the Bolsheviks in Germany. They put down the Spartacists in Berlin and killed their leadership. In Bavaria, various Freikorps militias put down the Munich Red Army, which had been formed by the Russian-supported Bavarian Soviet.[6] (One of the soldiers of this Red Army was Adolf Hitler.) Once order was restored in Bavaria, Berlin, and the industrial Ruhr Valley, some of the Freikorps units struck out against their employers, the republican government. On March 13, 1920, the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch tried to overthrow the left-wing republic and replace it with a nationalist and monarchist government. The coup failed and the more radical elements of the Freikorps went underground, forming cells that would carry out assassinations throughout the turbulent 1920s.[7]

The Ordnungszelle ideal was put in place on March 14, 1920 in Bavaria. On that date, General Arnold Ritter von Mohl, the commander of Group IV of the German Army (at this point called the Reichswehr), carried out a quiet coup. Von Mohl tried to convince Johannes Hoffmann, the Bavarian prime minister and a member of the ruling SPD, to hand over all executive authority to him. Von Mohl’s compatriots included the monarchist politician Georg Escherich, Munich police chief Ernst Pohner, and Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the district president of Upper Bavaria. Hoffmann balked at the ploy and resigned. Von Kahr was elected by a single vote to replace Hoffmann, and his government would rule with a coalition made up of the populist Bavarian Peasants’ League, the liberal German Democratic Party (DPP), and the monarchist Bavarian People’s Party (BVP).[8] Von Kahr’s government intended for Bavaria, Germany’s second largest state and an ancient bastion of Catholicism and traditional conservatism, to be a refuge for all right-wing dissidents accused of trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic. It is here, in von Kahr’s Bavaria, that the German Workers’ Party (DAP) got their feet under them and established a power base in Munich.

At this point, the question must be asked: why study von Kahr and the “cell of order” idea at all? If von Kahr gave protection to the DAP-NSDAP, and if von Kahr’s authoritarian government failed to stop the Nazi monstrosity, then what benefit could his story be to us today? The answer: quite a lot. Von Kahr may have turned Bavaria into a hiding place for right-wing radicals, but he was no Nazi or Nazi sympathizer. Indeed, the Beer Hall Putsch began after Hitler and his supporters stormed the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich during a speech by von Kahr. Von Kahr, along with General Otto von Lossow, the head of the Bavarian Army, and Colonel Hans von Seißer of the Bavarian state police, were placed in a private room by Hitler. Here, Hitler, along with the war hero Ludendorff, convinced all three to support a Nazi takeover of Bavaria. This was all bluster, for as soon as Hitler left to try and stop Nazi street thugs from shooting it out with the Reichswehr, von Kahr and the officers issued a public statement saying that their political “conversion” had come at gunpoint and was therefore invalid.

On the morning after the debacle in the beer hall, some 3,000 Nazis marched on Munich. They were met by German soldiers and Bavarian police officers. It is not known who fired first, but somewhere between fourteen and sixteen Nazis, along with three police officers, died in the fighting.[9] Von Kahr and the Ordnungszelle won the day, but ultimately von Kahr, the Bavarian arch-nationalist and monarchist, was murdered by the SS during the infamous “Night of the Long Knives.” Hitler’s goons branded him a traitor and shot him down like a dog. From here the Third Reich plunged the world into the deadliest conflict in human history.

Cell of Order – Past and Future

It is important to remember that until the final and irreversible blow came in January 1933, the only parts of Germany that never voted en masse for either the Nazis or the German Communist Party (KPD) were Bavaria and the equally Catholic Rhineland.[10] Von Kahr’s short-lived cell of order provided a much stronger bulwark against the National Socialists than the SPD or the KPD (which sometimes collaborated with the more left-wing Berlin NSDAP during labor disputes).[11] The cell of order in Bavaria may have failed in the end, but that does not mean that the cell of order format could not work in the United States. After all, we in America theoretically have strong municipal and state governments, although the never-ending bloat of D.C. has drastically weakened those institutions.

Cities like Portland, Ore., where investigative journalist Andy Ngo was assaulted by Antifa with cement-laced milkshakes while Portland cops sat on their hands, or Baltimore, a murder- and rat-infested hellscape[12] that suddenly became a beautiful retreat once President Donald Trump spoke ill of it, could use an Ordnungszelle government. The problem, of course, is that the voters in Portland and Baltimore would never vote for a quasi-military government in their cities, no matter how bad things get on the streets. This article will discuss the possibility of establishing cells of order in some of America’s most blighted cities. All options will be on the table, including martial law or the declaration of emergency. This may sound rather drastic, but remember that liberty cannot exist without order. The cities profiled here deprive their citizens of liberty, and therefore should be put under a cell of order. Such governments have existed before in Bavaria and beyond. I will discuss three examples here. These brief summations are not intended to be exhaustive.

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen: The Deep North

When Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen died in 2005, the left-wing Independent magazine made a point of noting the “mixed tributes” that the late, great man received.[13] Without question Bjelke-Petersen ruled the Australian state of Queensland with an “iron fist” for nineteen years (1968–87), and yet, one cannot say that Queensland is a failed state, a bastion of crime, or a viper’s nest of debauchery. Queensland is the heart of conservative, traditional Australia and Sir Joh knew that well.

Born in New Zealand to a Lutheran pastor originally from Denmark, Bjelke-Petersen contracted polio as a young man and was thereby ineligible to serve his country during World War II. In 1947 he entered the Queensland parliament as a member of the Country Party, later National Party. Twenty-one years later, the young son of Aussie soil found himself the premiere of Queensland following the death of long-time politico Jack Pizzey. It did not take Sir Joh long to start making enemies. A lot of this was due to his avowedly populist approach and his “Johspeak”, a type of hillbilly patois designed to show his loyalty to agrarian Queensland. Bjelke-Petersen talked the talk, and he spent the majority of his career implementing economic reforms that made Queensland into the dynamo of the Australian economy. Bjelke-Petersen pursued developmentalism[14], which between 1983 and 1986 saw hydraulic dams built every single year in Queensland. On top of that, new mines were regularly built and a $230 million-plus resort helped to draw tourists to the once forsaken north.

Bob Katter, himself a Queenslander populist who is often mocked by the media and establishment, noted years after Bjelke-Petersen’s demise that:

“In 1958, Australia was in fact a coal-importing nation. But by the late 1960s we had become a major coal-exporting country. …By the mid-1980s were the biggest coal-exporting nation on Earth. The Australian economy throughout the 1980s was carried by the aluminium and coal industries – both of them established by Bjelke-Petersen government. This really was the essence of the remarkable achievements of that government. …During [1983], Queenslanders’ cost of living was very low. We had the cheapest electricity prices in the world.”[14]

Under Bjelke-Petersen, Queensland experienced a population boom that was in response to its thriving economy. No premiere has did as much for Queensland as this so-called “hillbilly” and back-country bumpkin.

Bjelke-Petersen’s government was socially conservative to the core. Sir Joh, who did not smoke and only occasionally imbibed white wine, made it a crime for bartenders to serve drinks to drug dealers, deviants, or pedophiles and was a rabid opponent of socialism, communism, and the centralized state. He supported Rhodesia and South Africa during the 1970s, saw Amnesty International as communist propaganda, and implemented police tactics that were so strong and bold that many began to call his Queensland a “police state.” Some writers have even suggested that Bjelke-Petersen’s police were involved in Brisbane’s underworld, including drug trafficking and assassinations.[15]

Sir Joh believed so much in localism that he once told his entourage during a visit to Japan that they should remind their hosts that they were Queenslanders, not Australians.[14] This fierce sense of local identity, along with his devout Christian faith and his belief in supporting agrarian and industrial development, defined Petersen’s reign. Another and less fortunate part of Sir Joh’s state was endemic corruption, and his tolerance and support for widespread graft ultimately led to his downfall.

Maurice Duplessis: La Grande Noirceur

Quebec has an identity that is separate from Anglophone Canada. This cannot be denied. Traditional Quebec is about more than just the French language however, and Maurice Duplessis knew this. Born in Trois-Riveres, Quebec in 1890, Duplessis imbibed ancient Quebec Catholicism like mother’s milk. He was educated at Catholic schools (Notre Dame and Laval) and was admitted to the bar in 1913. In 1927, the young politician was elected to the Legislative Assembly as a Conservative. Between then and his election as Quebec’s premiere in 1936, Duplessis articulated Quebecois autonomy within a federal Canadian system, supported Catholic culture and Catholic institutions, and championed the removal of socialists and labor unions from their seats of power in Montreal and Quebec City. These ideas propelled Duplessis and the conservative nationalist Union Nationale party into power.

Duplessis’s time as the caudillo of Quebec came to be known as la Grande Noirceur, or “the Great Darkness” (1936–59). Despite the horror that this term is meant to invoke, the “Great Darkness” was only dark to Quebec’s social democrats, left-wing nationalists, secularists, and all those opposed to Duplessis’s legislative efforts to maintain Quebec’s Catholic heritage and its autonomy within a larger Canadian union. As Conrad Black, Duplessis’s greatest English-speaking biographer, noted in an article for the National Post, the common left-wing vision of Duplessis’s government is that “Duplessis was in league with the Roman Catholic clergy to hold Quebec in a state of public policy retardation”.[16] But according to Black,

“[Duplessis] carried the French working class of Quebec in six of the seven general elections when he was a party leader, and the last four despite the opposition of most of the leadership of organized labour. He discouraged labour unrest, but legislated increased wages and benefits. From 1944 to 1959, Quebec and Ontario both enjoyed gross increases in primary and manufacturing production of about 8.5 per cent annually, and despite Quebec’s heavy birthrate, average pay rose 160 per cent, compared to 140 per cent in Ontario. The number of motor vehicles in Quebec increased by 850 per cent, compared to 300 per cent in Ontario. The number of university students in Quebec tripled, to a larger total than Ontario’s, though Quebec had only 80 per cent of Ontario’s population. All relevant indicators of economic and social progress followed the same pattern. Duplessis built 3,000 schools, all the university campuses except McGill, all the original autoroutes, and rural electrification connected to 97 per cent of homes, up from about 20 per cent in 1944. Despite the larger Quebec families, Quebec’s per capita personal income rose from 65 per cent of Ontario’s in 1944 to 87 per cent of Ontario’s in 1959. Quebec had the most comprehensive daycare system of any province by the middle of the Fifties.”[17]

But Duplessis’s legacy quickly fell into disarray once he left office. As noted by George Grant in his 1965 book Lament for a Nation, Duplessis’s vision of Quebec autonomy and the uniqueness of the Canadian system of monarchical federalism could not withstand the onslaught of the republican dynamo to the south. By the early 1960s, Grant noted that the “Canadian ruling class looks across the border for its final authority in both politics and culture.”[18] Making matters that much worse was that the America that the Canadian elites began emulating was not the America of the nationalist-populist Theodore Roosevelt or the Jeffersonian small farmer. Rather, by 1965 (the year Grant’s book was published), America was becoming consumed by materialism and a booming generation of self-obsessed college students. 1965 was also the year when the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act passed, thus helping to set the stage for our dangerous and blood-soaked immigration situation.[19]

The situation continued to devolve in Canada. By 1963, Quebec had become a battleground. Radical members of the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) began a bombing campaign in that year which would ultimately end with a record of two hundred separate detonations.[20] The FLQ-driven October Crisis of 1970, which saw the left-wing group kidnap and assassinate Quebecois politicians, forced the left-wing liberal Pierre Trudeau to call out the Canadian Army. Prime Minister Trudeau, in a rare moment of sanity, all but invoked the Ordnungszelle ideology when he told critics of his use of Canadian troops:

“Well, there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed. But it’s more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don’t like the looks of…”[21]

The October Crisis was put down, but the crisis of the Quebecois nation has not been solved. In 2010, Quebec was found to be the most corrupt Canadian province by a wide margin.[22] Things are not much better nine years later.

Calvin Coolidge: Massachusetts is American!

Calvin Coolidge would have never been the president if he had not first been the governor of Massachusetts. More to the point, Coolidge’s rise to the top ranks of the national Republican Party was made possible by his law-and-order stance during the Boston police strike of September 1919.

On September 9, over 1,100 Boston police officers walked off the job following a protracted and failed bid to get the city to recognize their right to form a union.[23] Everyone knew the strike was coming; Boston Mayor Andrew Peters, a Yankee Democrat in a city increasingly under the control of Irish Catholics, tried up until the last hour to get the Boston police and Police Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis (another Yankee and a Republican to boot) to agree to a settlement. The police did have legitimate grievances:

“Patrolmen worked a 7-day week, with one day off every 15 days. Patrolmen who worked the day shift put in 73 hours a week and ‘night men’ worked 83 hours a week, while ‘wagon men’ worked 98 hours. […] Additionally, even during his free time, a patrolman could not leave the city limits without express permission.”[24]

The point of contention was over whether or not municipal workers, especially municipal workers tasked with protecting citizens, had the right to unionize and potentially strike. Curtis thought that the idea of police unions was inimical to the job, therefore he refused to cooperate with Peters or the cops. Governor Coolidge kept out of the fray because he believed that it was a municipal matter, not a state matter.[25]

Coolidge’s usual reticence was forced to change because Boston erupted into violence almost as soon as the strike began. As Francis Russell notes in his classic book on the police strike, the night of September 9 saw “little bands of hoodlums gathered, and noticing the absence of bluecoats, began removing spare tires from parked automobiles and knocking off the hats of innocent pedestrians”.[26] Wildcat dice games began appearing everywhere, with the Boston Commons becoming a giant open-air casino. Scollay Square, the West End, and Roxbury all saw mob violence that would eventually cost the city thousands of dollars in damages. In proletarian South Boston, grocery stores were vandalized and public trams were pelted with rotten fruit, eggs, and large stones.[27]

To keep this lawlessness from spreading, Coolidge called out the state militia. These troops would remain the primary police force in Boston until December. Meanwhile, newspapers in Boston and across the nation lionized Coolidge as the man who brought law and order back to a city on the verge of a Bolshevik revolution.[28] During the gubernatorial election of November 1919, when Boston’s streets were still patrolled by soldiers, Coolidge defeated the Democratic candidate Richard H. Long by 317,774 votes to 192,673. When Coolidge heard about these results, he supposedly told the press, “Three words tell the result…Massachusetts is American!”[29] Coolidge’s other big quote from this time came in a telegram to Samuel Gompers, the head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Coolidge told Gompers, who supported the striking policemen, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”

Coolidge’s tenure as the governor of Massachusetts saw him do more than put down the police strike and stop rioting. Under his hand, Massachusetts veterans were paid a bonus of $100 ($1,400 in 2018 dollars).[30] Other measures included reducing the work week for women and children from fifty-four hours to forty-eight, reducing Massachusetts’s debt by $4 million by reducing overall expenditures, and vetoing a proposal to increase the salaries of state legislators by fifty percent.[31] Such populist leadership is at odds with the current image of Coolidge as a cold-hearted purist dedicated to small government at all costs.

Lessons Learned

A few lessons must be learned from the governments of Bjelke-Petersen, Duplessis, and Coolidge. These men succeeded in turning their provinces and states into cells of order that were economically strong and culturally stable. The blueprints that they made can be recreated by those inclined toward local politics. Look no further than the example of Alabama, which this year passed anti-abortion legislation[32] out-of-step with the rest of the country, thereby incurring the wrath of the New York-D.C.-Palo Alto leviathan. In order to break up the empire of bureaucratic centralization, the true Right must first and foremost concern itself with protecting local culture, customs, and identity. One way to do this is by supporting or creating Ordnungszellen whereby the demonologies of hyper-individualism and progressive liberalism are contained by strong communal bonds and interlocking sets of interpersonal obligations.

Another lesson to be learned is that all three men discussed above were neither ideological purists nor chained to the dogmas of their respective parties. Far too many libertarians obsess over principles. By fetishizing principles, libertarians and conservatives fail to realize that principles do not matter if they do not come into practice. There is nothing wrong at a strategic level with the type of pragmatic populism and traditionalist conservatism that these three men espoused. Again, it bears repeating that without law and order protecting a society built on social capital and communal trust, there can be no liberty. More to the point, libertarians are far too obsessed with rights, not realizing that liberty cannot exist without virtue. The Romans, who gave civilization to the West, and by extension North America, understood this and built their society around the cultivation of virtue. Look around you; does America look virtuous? If not, then will harping on individualistic “rights” do anything to save our civilization? Bjelke-Petersen, Duplessis, and Coolidge supported their constituents and promoted the greater social good without resorting to the chiliasm of socialism.[33]

These examples also demonstrate behaviors to avoid. Political corruption will undermine any such effort, as will failure to make long-term plans in terms of framework and successors. If a cell of order is revealed to be corrupt, then citizens will turn against it no matter how much good it managed to accomplish. As for charismatic leadership, it is both fleeting and pointless without a base of support. Consider Hungary and Russia. Unless a new generation of citizens are ready and willing to pursue the legacies of Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, then what is to stop the opposition for hollowing out everything those leaders created?

Conclusion: Creating Ordnungszellen

Now we come to the final question: how do we build cells of order? The obvious answer would be to find politicians predisposed to the idea and support them in local elections. Voters need to inform themselves about local politics and those who are seeking their votes. Americans these days are far too focused on national politics and overlook local politics – the politics that will directly impact their lives. [34]

A disengaged body politic is susceptible to manipulations of entrenched local elites or radical activists who have replaced religion and true meaning in their lives with progressive causes. Those series about liberty and about law and order need to pay attention to state, county, and municipal elections, regardless of where they live. Yes, what happens in New York and Los Angeles matters more on the national stage than what happens in Springfield or Bridgeport. But, unlike New York or Los Angeles, cells of order can easily be created and sustained in small town and rural America. Paying attention to local politics and giving money, support, and votes to politicians espousing Ordnungszellen is critical.

Another would to become politicians or local leaders ourselves. Being cynical about politics in 2019 is understandable. Mass democracies, despite their claims to the contrary, disenfranchise, alienate, and  ultimately end in tyranny. [35] Given that we live in a corrupted democracy, we can do two things simultaneously: 1) we can enter into local politics as viable candidates in order to strengthen local and de-centralized power, and 2) by entering local politics we can leverage power in order to keep the oncoming Caesar aligned to our ideals of authority, order, and liberty.

It should go without saying that preferred local candidates would be property owners, have families, and have enough private income to deflect the lure of tainted political money. One of the great strengths of Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign was his legitimate boast that money was not a concern to him as he was already a millionaire. Left-wing populists gnashed their teeth over this, but who is more likely to be corrupt: a man who came into politics with a fortune or a man who enters politics in order to make a fortune? The answer is obvious. As such, before any of us can decides to enter the political arena, we must insure that our own houses are in order. A cell of order politician must not be venal or open to corruption; a cell of order politician needs to be imbued with Roman or Prussian virtues.

A third and more radical option would be to agitate for declarations of emergency or martial law in those cities which have shown an inability to restore law and order (e.g. Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Portland). During a time of commissary dictatorship[36], governors and mayors should use their extraordinary powers to clamp down on civil unrest, criminality, and any organized threat to local peace.

It is already accepted that, in times of emergency, state and municipal officials can mobilize the National Guard and state police. These mobilizations are meant to be temporary. But, given the sorry state of so many American cities, what if such mobilizations lasted until order was restored? This restoration is not taken to mean a restoration to the previous state of criminality and decay, but rather a restoration to the former glory of the city or state.

The longer term deployment of these National Guard soldiers would have a hidden benefit: by keeping these soldiers based in or near local communities, the leviathan in Washington would find it hard to mobilize them for foreign deployments. Such a situation would make it harder for Washington to engage in neoliberal interventions, as one could make the case for establishing semi-permanent National Guard postings in Detroit, Baltimore, Portland, St. Louis, the US-Mexican border, and those rural counties most blighted by the opioid scourge.

Finally, we all must recognize that the first and most important cell of order is within oneself. We all must cultivate virtue before we can enjoy the fruits of freedom. We must stop being slaves to our vices and the lure of materialism. We have to master ourselves before we can hope to inspire others, and wonders of the world cannot rest upon rotten foundations.

References

  1. Broue, Pierre (2006). The German Revolution, 1917–1923. Haymarket Books. p. 135.
  2. Kolko, Gabriel (1994). Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society Since 1914. New Press. p. 281.
  3. “The Kiel Sailors’ Revolt: Fourteen Points Raised by the Soldiers’ Council” (1918, Nov. 4). GDHI.
  4. Horn, Daniel (1978, Feb. 1). Review of Martin Kitchen’s “The Silent Dictatorship: The Politics of German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1916-1918”. The American Historical Review, Volume 83, Issue 1, p. 194.
  5. Tucker, Spencer (2005). World War I: Encyclopedia, Volume I. ABC-CLIO. p. 488.
  6. Weber, Thomas (2017). Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi. Oxford University Press. p. 46.
  7. Crim, Brian E. (2007). “Terror from the Right: Revolutionary Terrorism and the Failure of the Weimar Republic.” The Journal of Conflict Studies, p. 51–63.
  8. Winkler, Heinrich August (2006). Germany: The Long Road West, 1789-1933. Oxford University Press. p. 370.
  9. Kerr, John A. (2003). Germany, 1919-1939. Heinemann Educational Publishers. p. 32–3.
  10. Spenkuch, Jorg L.; Tillmann, Philipp (Mar. 2017). “Elite Influence? Religion and the Electoral Success of the Nazis”. American Journal of Political Science.
  11. Longerich, Peter (2015). Goebbels: A Biography. Random House. p. 191.
  12. Thomas, Cal (2019, Aug. 3). “Smelling rats in Baltimore”. Baltimore Sun.
  13. “Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Despotic premier of Queensland”. The Independent. 2005 Apr. 26.
  14. Katter, Bob (2014, Jan. 1). “Sir Joh delivered wealth and freedom to Queenslanders in 1983”. The Sydney Morning Herald.
  15. Condon, Matthew (2014, Mar. 26). “Jacks and Jokers: Bjelke-Petersen and Queensland’s ‘police state’”. The Conversation.
  16. Black, Conrad (2016, Jun. 30). “Why Maurice Duplessis won four straight terms”. National Post.
  17. Grant, George (2005). Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. McGill-Queen’s University Press. p. 9.
  18. Smith, Denis (2013, Aug. 13). “October Crisis.” The Canadian Encyclopedia.
  19. Sutton, James P. (2019, Jul. 16). “Why So Little Coverage of the ICE Attack?”. National Review.
  20. “The October Crisis”. CBC.
  21. “Trudeau: ‘Just Watch Me’”. The Globe and Mail. 2010 Oct. 5.
  22. Patriquin, Martin (24 Sep. 2010). “Quebec: The most corrupt province”. Maclean’s.
  23. Russell, Francis (1975). A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike. Beacon Hill Press. p. 102.
  24. Ibid., p. 50.
  25. Ibid., p. 59.
  26. Ibid., p. 126.
  27. Ibid., p. 137.
  28. Shales, Amity (2013). Coolidge. HarperCollins. p. 171.
  29. Russell, p. 212.
  30. Sobel, Robert (1998). Coolidge: An American Enigma. Regnery Publishing. p. 117.
  31. Fuess, Claude Moore (1940). Calvin Coolidge: The Man from Vermont. Little Brown. p. 186.
  32. Elliott, Debbie (2019, Mar. 1). “Alabama Abortion Lawmakers Move to Outlaw Abortion in Challenge to Roe v. Wade”. NPR.
  33. Nulle Terre Sans Seigneur (2018, Jul. 9). “Temptations of right-wing socialism”. Carlsbad 1819.
  34. Maciage, Mike (Oct. 2014). “Voter Turnout Plummeting in Local Elections.” Governing.
  35. Mosse, George L. (1971). “Caesarism, Circuses, and Monuments.” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, p. 167-182.
  36. Schmitt, Carl (2015). Dictatorship. Polity. p. 35.

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