ANDREW JACKSON, TECUMSEH, AND THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION

Frieze portraying death of Tecumseh, Rotunda, US Capitol

After Jack Wheeler wrote Trump Ends the Snipe Hunt for Middle East Peace last week (12/07), then discussed President Trump’s admiration for our 9^th President Andrew Jackson in the HFR of 12/08, I posted comments on the Forum connecting what I saw were the dots.

Jack was kind enough to ask that I flesh out my comments in a TTP article.  I’ll start with a synopsis.  If that intrigues you, read on!

My Synopsis

This will be interesting to watch. No one before Trump has attempted to apply Jacksonianism as a cure to the problems created by the Balfour Declaration.

History says that it might work. Jacksonian concepts of merit and decentralized federalism, deregulation, and local banking (vs politicized banking, racial, religious, and class identity politics) superseded the lingering European ideas that the British had counted on to re-conquer the United States with the War of 1812.

If President Trump’s approach works in the Middle East, then unleashing this proven antidote to socialism and identity politics will affect many more political regions than just the land between Egypt and Israel.  Particularly ours.

For example, if success results in the Neocons in both the Republican and Democrat parties transitioning from their Neocon outlook to the Jacksonian outlook, then an utterly new era in American politics will be born. Liberty will expand.  Jacksonian success will impact the Democrat party, forcing them to abandon coalitions intended to divide and conquer.

The strength of the Jacksonian attitude is with its ability to break logjams and make things happen.  The Wikepedia entry for Jacksonian Democracy is worth reading, as you’ll quickly see the parallels between Jackson and Trump.

Here, I want to make an analogy between the Palestinians of our day and the Woodland Indians of Jackson’s time. Most of the Indian tribes were part of Tecumseh’s Coalition and allied with England during the war.  Excepting the Creeks, Woodland Indians signed on with the enemy of the United States with the hope of gaining a state of their own through a treaty with England.

They committed terrorist acts against the United States, and lost. Regardless of the politically correct history, the Woodland Indians were an ally of an enemy power. Jackson removed them by force.

I would urge the Palestinians to study Jackson, Trump, and the Indian Removal Act. Perhaps they should also study the military career of William Henry Harrison, the James Mattis of the era.

Harrison defeated Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames and broke the Indian Coalition, making the Woodland Indians a hostile but stateless people. Jackson finished the task. The Palestinians would be prudent to understand the Jacksonian principle known as “get er done.”

The Balfour Declaration

The Ottoman Empire dissolved on August 10, 1920 with the Treaty of Sévres. As Turkey was a member of the defeated Central powers, the agreement surrendered Turkey’s long hold on much of the Middle East. The treaty contained the Balfour Declaration, a 1917 British position that Palestine was to contain a home for the Jewish people.  Britain assumed control of the area as The British Mandate.  The League of Nations endorsed the Balfour Declaration, assigning the well-being of locals to English Protection using the same Regional Power Theory that President Obama used to justify his massive support of Iran.

Later, in 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine passed Resolution 181 recommending the establishment of Israel, an Arab state, and an independent Jerusalem. Jerusalem was to be administered as a territory, not a state, under international direction.So began the most difficult real estate problem of the modern world.

Nearly fifty years have passed and there have been direct wars, shifting borders, proxy wars, and endless talk among the world’s diplomatic corps.The Palestinian people remain stateless while their leaders fret about the loss of Islamic culture and adaptation of Western ways.  They remain stateless, with land is held in common, in an attempt to create a buffer zone between Israel and certain Islamic States The diplomats talk, documents are signed, and little changes except for Israel’s borders. Iranians fund a proxy war against Israel and provide arms and logistics to the tribal organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas.

In reality, many do not want a Palestinian state as this would recognize the legitimacy of Israel and prevent her eventual submergence under a wave of Palestinian demographics.  A new state would be under self-rule, not held in common as an Islamic Territory.

The peace efforts attempted over these five decades have common elements. They are complex, they give agency to political factions, and they are logically and legally deductive from unchallenged assumptions. They emphasize historicism and historic documents such as Balfour.

Another way might exist.

Jacksonian Philosophy

Many are discovering the philosophy of Andrew Jackson for the first time.  As all things on the internet, many now reference or simply plagiarize Walter Russel Mead from an excellent article he wrote in 1999 for The National Interest, “The Jacksonian Tradition.” Pundits declare the tradition to be the backwards, obsolete, unenlightened culture of the irredeemable deplorables.

Andrew Jackson is consideredto be a disgrace by the public education industry and his presidency is taught briefly and with contempt.

His winning the Battle of New Orleans, which ranks among the Battles of Yorktown, Stalingrad, and Hastings in historical significance, is taught as a mere skirmish fought unfairly after the conclusion of the War of 1812.

His Indian Removal Act is taught as one of America’s original sins and justification for an extra helping of white guilt.

Jackson’s ownership of slaves is so reprehensible that his removal from the twenty-dollar bill is a serious political objective. He opposed central banking and deficit spending. Clearly, the Education Mafia argues, Jackson was a national mistake.

His greatest sin? Andrew Jackson opposed the establishment of a national education system based on rote learning. He preferred apprenticeships using the Socratic teaching method. Two Jesuit priests, presumably through the Socratic Method, educated Jackson.

In reality, the Jacksonian Philosophy of Leadership is very much alive and very much part of Western Philosophy. It belongs with the Empirical School rather than with the Rationalists, or their spawn, the Progressives.

Jacksonian logic is inductive, not deductive. This means it connects the dots formed by measurable and testable observations to create new ideas. Sometimes these ideas are wrong.  Many times they are new and timely.

Progressive Rationalism, on the other hand, uses logical deduction. Deduction applies prior theories, rules, or dogma in order to draw conclusions without the inclusion of new observations. It is highly dependent on initial assumptions.

Modern Progressivism is wholly a rationalist construction and is especially vulnerable to Jacksonian inductive philosophy that invalidates Progressive assumptions.  In the rock-paper-scissors world of philosophy, induction breaks deduction.

A Solid Pedigree

The Jacksonian philosophical pedigree begins all the way back with Socrates and passes through Aristotle. Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, who cut the Gordian Knot, and went on winning unbelievable victories until his death.  Logical induction led Alexander to think outside the box as he Westernized much of the ancient world.

Next came Epicurus. The Epicureans wanted to know what all this winning was for, and how the five senses might be utilized to keep on winning.

Rome rose and flourished, bringing Cicero and his Eclecticism. The Eclectics realized that assumptions might be wrong, thus great effort should be given to testing assumptions.

Rome fell; things grew dim for a while.  Two important branches of empirical thought emerged. The first was Scholasticism with Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. The second was the merger of the Talmud with Aristotle by Maimonides.  This enabled the intellectual basis for the Renaissance.

The Renaissance of Islam, however, failed to launch with the rejection of the Islamic Aristotle, Avicenna – see Jack Wheeler’s Opening the Doors of Islam (October 2016). The world is still waiting for Islam to embrace Aristotle.

Time passed.  Next came Copernicus and the Natural Philosophers.

By placing the Sun and not the Earth at the center of the solar system, Copernicus became the real father of the Jacksonian Tradition. The Empiricists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, gave birth to the Scottish Enlightenment in Europe, from the same Copernican roots.

The Scottish Enlightenment grew into the American Enlightenment of Jefferson and Maddison while the parallel philosophy now known as the Jacksonian Tradition soldiered on namelessly for more than a century.

Marxism, Progressivism, and all the stripes of socialism emerged and attacked the American Enlightenment via the Frankfurt School’s march through the institutions. One by one, America’s institutions were corrupted by manipulation of primary assumptions relating to man and the state.

However, absent a name, the Jacksonian Tradition thrived behind the scenes. Sure, it had emerged from time to time with William Tecumseh Sherman and Blackjack Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and Curtis LeMay.  But Progressives did not understand that a competing American philosophy with solid roots in empiricism was growing and multiplying.

Barry Goldwater’s announcement to the world of this second American philosophy stunned the Progressives.

Incubating behind the scenes, American Empiricism developed two important branches. The first is American Pragmatism and championed by Pierce, Dewey, and James. The second is Objectivism, championed by Ayn Rand.  The Jacksonian tradition is a parallel construction, similar, but not exactly the same as Pragmatism or Objectivism.  Close.

President Reagan tapped into the growing empiricism and used it to bring down the Soviet Union. He coined the very empirical phrase, “Trust but Verify.” It changed history.

Progressives heavily invest in Rationalism.They are all-in to bury Jefferson and Madison. With the rise of Reagan, Progressives continued to discount him and his use of Jackson, Rand, and Dewey.  Progressives did not realize that they were facing off against the deeply resilient forms of Empiricism.

Somehow, they failed to understand that they were up against the thought process that Alexander used to cut the Gordian Knot.  And cut the knot is exactly what Reagan did.

President Trump uses empiricism like a boss.  He continues the knot-cutting that Alexander the Great set in motion.  Empiricism takes down Progressivism like Thor’s Hammer.

We Have Been Here Before

England’s Sixty Years War from 1754-1814 was the struggle to control North America’s Great Lakes region. Drawing an analogy with the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, the area had been under French colonial control for more than a century.

Things began to change in 1754 as the Seven Years War between France and England spilled over into North America as the French and Indian War. The British intended to take the Great Lakes and what is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin from the French.  George Washington cut his chops during the war, fighting on the British side.

France lost and the area became a non-state British territory until the Treaty of Paris at the conclusion of the American Revolution. So began a series of smaller wars and skirmishes between the United States and Indians paid by the British to be their proxies.

The Indians had allied with France during the French and Indian War (1754-1763), then with England during Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-1765), Lord Dunmore’s War (1774), American Revolution (1775-1783), Northwest Indian War (1785-1795), Tecumseh’s War (1812), and the War of 1812 (1812-1814).

The British continued to politicize the territory granted to the United States with the hope of forming a buffer state to prevent westward American expansion and contain American notions of individualism.

Much like Iran in the modern Middle East, England supplied and enraged the Indians to raid the American frontier.  They used terror tactics and especially attacked barges and flatboat convoys along the waterways.

The Shawnee chief known as Tecumseh (1768-1813) grew up during the American Revolution and learned the craft of warfare in an up close and personal way.  He was the son of a white captive woman raised as either a Creek or Cherokee and a minor Shawnee chief. Tecumseh translates as “He Who Walks Across the Sky,” which becomes important later in his life.

As the War of 1812 loomed, President James Madison directed General William Henry Harrison to counter Tecumseh’s Confederacy of tribes armed by the British to fight Americans.

Harrison is described as the General James Mattis of his day. He was a tough, well-read intellectual with a clear understanding of the arc of history. He was greatly respected by the troops with a policy of leading from the front.

Harrison, as well as most of the Indians, wanted to conduct business between the United States and Indians on a tribe-by-tribe basis by a policy of recognizing property rights for both parties.

Tecumseh argued that individual tribes did not have title to land, that it was held in collective form for the entire Indian race. He threatened to murder any Indian chief that sold land or negotiated individually with Americans.  The British assured Tecumseh that land was owned by the king, and never by individuals.

It is arguable that Tecumseh sought the same form of Feudalism that modern regional powers wish to maintain in the Palestinian Territory.

Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa, known as The Prophet, led a form of millennialist religious revival among young, male, culturally transitioning Woodland Indians.The basic spiritual idea was the unification of all Indian tribes to prepare for a great future battle with the Americans.  The Great Spirit would return during the battle and push the Americans from North America. Everything would be as it once was.

The Prophet preached that Indian purity and the rejection of everything Western was essential.  The Great Spirit was thought to be a jealous spirit and demanded the purity of the old ways. However, once exposed to metal tools, woven fabrics, and comfortable beds, the Woodland Indians did not really want to return to the stone age, making things tough for The Prophet.

The Prophet improved his sales pitch by announcing a vision where the Great Spirit protected the Indian braves during battle and none would be injured.  They were to receive the white man’s women as sex slaves after victory in the great battle. But only if they remained pure to the ancient ways.

Bands of braves bought into the vision, many were killed by Harrison at the Battle of Tippecanoe (November 1811, near Lafayette, Indiana).  The Prophet lost support. It seems that religious purity and the quest for war booty was not sufficient to defeat the American forces, and the Great Spirit was elsewhere that day.

Meanwhile, Tecumseh continued to push the idea of an Indian confederation and the creation of an Indian utopia with land held in common, and under the guidance of a single leader hunted in common, and farmed in common. Each brave would receive the bounty according to his needs.

The massive New Madrid earthquakes coinciding with the Great Comet of 1811 was a clear sign of the Great Spirit’s support for Tecumseh’s Confederation, he argued – that all this was foretold by the Great Spirit naming him He Who Walks Across the Sky.  And indeed, in America the comet became known as “Tecumseh’s Comet” (in Europe though it was “Napoleon’s Comet”).

As many Indians joined Tecumseh, England remained in the background providing weapons and ammunition, intelligence services and logistical support to Indian raids on American settlements and transportation.

The United States initiated the War of 1812 partly in recognition that a major war was brewing in the Great Lakes region. The British and Tecumseh’s Indians won early victories until Commodore Perry defeated the British Navy on Lake Erie and the British lost their supply lines.

Harrison followed the retreating Brits and Tecumseh, defeating them at the Battle of The Thames, between Detroit and London, Ontario.  Tecumseh’s death –shot by Col. Richard Johnson as portrayed in the US Capitol Rotunda frieze above – ended his confederation along with British plans for a buffer state to contain the American frontier.

Southern Tribes

The Five Great Tribes in the southern United States — Creeks, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Seminole — were skeptical of Tecumseh’s Confederacy and few joined.

They were sovereign nations within Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi and had become plantation owners and hunters. They owned black slaves and became dependent on slavery for labor, a big problem that delayed their departure later in 1830, during one of their migrations to Oklahoma.

Much debate occurred in Congress from 1815 through 1829 as to the future of these tribes.  The rejected citizenship multiple times, preferring their status as independent nations within the states. The problem, of course, was the conflict between federal authority and state’s rights within those states. Eventually, Congress drafted the Indian Removal Act where Indians were to relocate to the Oklahoma Territory, which was federal land.

Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in April 1830, but delays, disposition of the slaves and property, and the general lack of logistical expertise led to the migration of the Indians during the winter months. The southern tribes were not equipped for winter, and it was a harsh winter. Many suffered and died on the way to the Oklahoma Territory.

Revisionist History

The 1960s saw the creation of the Red Western, a movie genre created by the East German film industry and using talent and techniques from the Germany’s WWII film industry.

Large productions were commissioned to both satisfy the demand for American Westerns in the Soviet Union, and to discredit Capitalism and the American way as much as possible.

So began the revisionist history of Americans as the greatest proponents of genocide in history. Not the Russians, not the Germans.

Several films were made depicting the Indian migration issues as intentional genocide and capitalist land grabbing.The KGB front publication, Ramparts Magazine, began promoting the Red Westerns during the 1960s and found a large audience among anti-Vietnam War protestors.

So began the march though the institutions of a new view on the Indian RemovalAct, that it was intended to be genocide.

Howard Zinn, Professor of History at Boston University and the Ward Churchill of his day, drove academic support for the historic revision. Zinn was an avowed communist sympathizer and prolific author, and contributor to Ramparts Magazine.

He had been a B-17 bombardier during WWII where he observed the results of several off-target bombing missions from the nose of his aircraft. He claimed that he could never get over a tragedy involving the napalming of the wrong French town due to his bombsight error. Today, he would be a candidate for a PTSD diagnosis.

Then, he was a central player in the condemnation of the American Military and especially Andrew Jackson through the mouthpiece of Ramparts. His legacy continues within the Boston academic community.The same Boston academics asserted that the poor FEMA performance after Hurricane Katrina amounted to genocide.  To argue otherwise is to undo the assumption that government and central planning are fallible.

Lessons Learned

American Empiricism, whether from the Jacksonian Tradition, Objectivist, or Pragmatist branches, effectively counters the underlying assumptions at the heart of Progressivism and Political Islam.  Treat the Palestinian matters as a property rights problem regardless of the propaganda and machinations from Iran.  They want to contain Israel to prevent modern ideas of property rights from expanding in the Middle East.

America is intellectually rich, yet failed to counter the revisionist history behind the Indian Removal Act.  Likewise, we have failed to counter the revisionist history behind the Balfour Declaration.  Totalitarian thought is deductive by definition.

TTPer Mike Ryan is an engineering consultant to the global minerals, fibers, and chemical industries.