Empire Eternal E-Book

Jenkins Sinclair

• Herausgeber: Antelope Hill Publishing LLC
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

“The men who founded these great civilizations are long gone, but their blood still lives within us. We are called to conquer. Our age, like every other age, is a war of all against all for the domination of space.”
 
Throughout the 19th and through the early 20th centuries, the European Great Powers established direct control over the majority of the planet, and suzerainty over the rest. Despite the crumbling of those empires under the hammer blows of two world wars and the machinations of the United States and the Soviet Union, the feats by which they were established and the titanic efforts of the brave few that fought to preserve them still reverberate in history. Brave warriors conquered foreign lands, planted their flags, and tried to grow new cultures that mirrored their own.
 
Sinclair Jenkins –writer, thinker, and dissident – lays out a resolute defense of, and advocacy for, that force of will which made the age of European Imperialism possible. From the conquering of the American West, to the bloody Rif War, to the heroic defenses of Katanga and Rhodesia,  Empire Eternal: In Defense of Imperialism is a tour de force of the various chapters of European Imperialism.
 
It is said that men did not love Rome because it is great – Rome was great because men loved her. These pages make it clear that likewise the European empires were not great because of some kind of overwhelming material superiority, but because of the eternal flame that pushed men to sacrifice for them – a flame that can never be extinguished.

Leseprobe

Empire Eternal: In Defense of Imperialism

Sinclair Jenkins

EMPIRE ETERNAL

In Defense of Imperialism

BY

S I N C L A I R J E N K I N S

A N T E L O P E ii H I L L ii P U B L I S H I N G

Copyright © 2021 Sinclair Jenkins

Second printing 2022.

This work contains a collection of writings, many of which were originally published by the author on American Renaissance (amren.com). Publication dates have been specified for these writings where applicable. Some minor edits have been made from these original publications.

Publisher’s Note: Antelope Hill is proud to publish various and at times differing perspectives which contribute to understanding the history of the European people, building their political consciousness, or demonstrating the intellect of contemporary White writers and thinkers. The relationship between the White race as a collective life and the concept of imperialism has sometimes been tense, and the imperialist reach of European blood throughout the earth has proceeded from differing motivations, some more or less noble, some more or less beneficial for Whites themselves. Regardless of the greater circumstances, the stories in this book are moments in history that demonstrate the martial prowess and courage of European men of action.

Cover art by Swifty

Edited by Taylor Young

Formatted by Margaret Bauer

Antelope Hill Publishing

antelopehillpublishing.com

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-956887-36-5

EPUB ISBN-13: 978-1-953730-22-0

Contents

Introduction

War of All Against All

The American Conquistador

The American Empire versus Islamism

Islamic State in the Victorian Era

A South African Tragedy

The Chinese Uprising Against Whites

White Hats, White Fighters

The Plan of San Diego

A Little-Known Chapter in the Muslim War Against the West

Mystical Nationalism and Ocean Dreams

The Racial Consciousness of Robert E. Howard

Avenging Adowa: The Second Italo-Ethiopian War

Fighting the Yellow Peril

Kenya’s National Hero: A Terrorist

White Giant: “Mad” Mike Hoare

Jock’s Law: “Mad Mitch” and Britain’s Last Days in Aden

A Warrior-Scholar’s Fight for Rhodesia

The Blowback Myth

Bring Back the White Man!

Viva Italia

A Modest Proposal for the US Conquest of Mexico

A New Pax Mediterranea

The State of Things

Introduction

Why imperialism? That question must be addressed. After all, for many on the right-wing of the spectrum, imperialism is the obvious enemy. American neoliberal imperialism has a stranglehold on the world, and every tendril of the monster oozes the grease of sexual depravity, homosexual and transsexual “rights,” minority privileges, and fawning adoration of the marketplace. If you care about European and American advocacy, then you would, in Anno Domini 2021, be an anti-imperialist or at least against the global leviathan of Washington, DC.

First of all, the American nation and its founding stock would not exist if it were not for imperialism. Rather than the US Constitution or even the Mayflower Compact, the true founding document of the American people is Richard Hakluyt’s A Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584). In that work and other pamphlets, the English patriot Hakluyt laid bare the many reasons why London should establish colonies (or “plantations”) in the New World much as had already been done in Ireland. Hakluyt argued that:

The Queen of England’s title to all the West Indies, or at the least to as much as is from Florida to the Circle arctic, is more lawful and right than the Spaniards or any other Christian Princes. . . .

That speedy planting in diverse fit places is most necessary upon these lucky western discoveries for fear of the danger of being prevented by other nations which have the like intentions, with the order thereof and other reasons therewithal alleged.1

Hakluyt’s propaganda found a receptive audience in Queen Elizabeth I as well as the poet-explorer-privateer Sir Walter Raleigh. Inspired by Hakluyt’s words, as well as the common English belief in the sheer barbarism of Spanish colonialism in the New World, Raleigh and his followers established the earliest English colonies in North America. These attempts would be succeeded by the permanent colonies in Virginia established by the Virginia Company of London. It is here, in the late sixteenth century, that the American spirit, with its Anglo roots, is first given expression in the mixture of idealism, adventure, and efficiency. In essence, the genus and germ of American nationalism is English imperialism.

There are those on the Dissident Right who articulate support for absolutist nationalism. Men like RAMZPAUL believe in nationalism for all races and peoples. Built into this belief system is the conceit that Euro-American identitarianism should only concern itself with the preservation of European homelands. This is a worthy cause. Indeed, in our age it is one of the few causes worth dying for. However, this brand of nationalist identitarianism is still a retreat—a philosophical surrender to forces of neoliberalism and Third World-ism. It is a surrender of the hands and a collective shout of: Just leave us alone!

The left will never leave us alone. The left is always hungry for more power. It is never satisfied. That is why fighting it is a necessity. Restoring imperialism is but one weapon to wield in this fight. However, this book seeks to show how it is the strongest, most proactive weapon.

Empire Eternal, which you hold in your hands now, is an attempt to show that the age of imperialism and colonialism was the apex of Euro-American civilization. My point in these essays, almost all of which are purely historical in nature and substance, is to reaffirm the glory of a European and American-led world order. In a similar way, this book seeks to argue that a return to imperialism would be a boon for Europeans and Americans, and indeed the rest of the world.

The stark truth facing us in the twenty-first century is that there are only two options: globalist hegemony led by China and Euro-American turncoats, or neo-imperialism led by nation-states. The former are akin to robber barons, who take and take without giving anything in return. The forces of global and neoliberal capital have no allegiance to the nation-state or their people, that is unless the nation-state in question is China (for more information on China’s desire for revenge against the West, see “The Chinese Uprising Against Whites”). Imperialists at the very least mostly provided their fellow citizens with the benefits of other lands. If they did not, then the drive for conquest would not last. Imperial states are also beholden to national voters; the same cannot be said of transnational corporations. There will never be an age of harmonious cooperation. This goes against human nature, and it always irritates large and powerful civilizations, which are built for conquest and expansion. Imperialism generates pride, new opportunities, and incredible vitality. Globalism provides nothing of value except to the elite few who can reap its rewards.

There is no hate here. The only emotion is pride—pride in Christendom, pride in our forefathers, and pride in the much maligned colonization system that gave the world the greatest creole civilizations ever known, from the Old South to the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The men who founded these great civilizations are long gone, but their blood still lives within us. We are called to conquer. Our age, like every other age, is a war of all against all for the domination of space. In addition, to paraphrase the great Bronze Age Pervert, the war for space knows no strategic alliances. No Black, Asian, or Latino nationalist will ever lift a finger for our movement. We are on our own, thank God. Therefore, let these essays inspire you to seek out adventure in distant lands, or stand fast in the arena of politics and proclaim your allegiance to a Greater Euro-American Order.

I would like to thank Jared Taylor and the editors at American Renaissance for publishing so many of these articles. To you all I owe a debt that can never be repaid. Finally, I would like to thank every editor that I have ever worked with, every friend I have made along the way, and every member of my extended family who has shed his or her blood for the maintenance of Christendom and the European-American world order. Although you wore diverse uniforms, from Confederate gray and Union blue to khaki and the soiled linen of Jamestown, your sacrifices mattered and still matter.

War of All Against All

American Renaissance, June 26th, 2020.

European minorities are often prone to the “bunker mentality.” Colonel Reginald Dyer, the Anglo-Indian commander of mostly Gurkha and Muslim troops during the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, has been pathologized by generations of armchair psychologists as an example of the bunker mentality because he had grown up as White minority in British India. Dyer and others of his ilk grew up with tales of the Sepoy Mutiny and the Bibighar Massacre, where the survivors of Cawnpore, almost all of whom were women and children, were slaughtered by local butchers under the command of a prostitute named Nana Saheb.2 The pied noirs of French Algeria had a similar outlook; today’s White South Africans do too.

In colonial New England, the Puritans, who mostly clung to the Atlantic coastline, had a similar disposition. Their enemies came in many forms: the French in Canada and their Native American proxies, the Dutch in New York and their Native American proxies, the tribes of New England like the powerful Narragansett, and the assorted “devils” that haunted the uncivilized forests. King Philip’s War (1676–1678) was the explosion of racial violence that the Puritans long feared. The New Englanders won, but at a cost of approximately 800 dead out of an overall population of 52,000 (a death rate of 1,538 per 100,000).3

As with all historical events, there is a debate over what caused King Philip’s War. The war saw conflict between new generations of leaders, both Indian and European. Metacom (aka King Philip) belonged to Wampanoag royalty. His father, Massasoit, brokered an era of long peace between his tribe and the New Englanders after extending goodwill to the Plymouth Colony after its establishment in 1620.4 Massasoit’s death coincided with the deaths of the first generation of New England leaders in Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Connecticut. English desire for land, as well as underhanded business practices such as plying Indians with alcohol, have also been named as the deciding factor. Philip, as a new sachem, made alliances with other Algonquin-speaking tribes in order to resist New England encroachment.5

The immediate cause of the war stemmed from the murder of John Sassamon, a Christian convert and a councilor alongside Philip at the Taunton Agreement in 1671. Another Christian Indian, Patuckson, told Plymouth Colony officials that Sassamon’s murder stemmed from his decision to warn the English about Philip’s intention to begin an offensive war.6 Plymouth tried the accused killers. Twelve New Englanders and an auxiliary jury of Indians found the defendants guilty. For King Philip and his tribal alliance, this was the opening salvo. On June 20th, 1675, a band of Pokanoket attacked the Plymouth settlement of Swansea.7

The war itself featured small-scale ambushes and town and village attacks. When Indian raiders showed up in New England towns with English-made muskets, the residents more often than not sought refuge in garrison houses or fortified blockhouses. This resulted in the burning or destruction of half of all towns between Maine (then part of the Massachusetts Bay) and southern Connecticut.8 The New England Confederation’s army relied on small militia units organized at the colony and town level:

By 1675, Massachusetts alone had some seventy-three organized companies. Each county maintained a dozen foot companies and one cavalry, while the counties of Suffolk, Middlesex, and Essex fielded a combined cavalry company. Each foot company contained about seventy privates and each cavalry about fifty. Muster days were held on a regular basis, although drilling could not compensate for the fact that New England’s defense was dependent on farmers unaccustomed to wilderness warfare.9

Indeed, it is worth remembering the quality and character of the people who settled New England. Historian David Hackett Fischer shows that New England’s Puritans came predominately from East Anglia, a unique region of eastern England claimed by the Jutes and where the heretical Lollards and other Reformation schismatics enjoyed power not seen elsewhere in the country.10 The families that settled New England did not settle as warriors, but as religiously-minded merchants. John Winthrop, the leader of the Massachusetts Bay and the man with the power to make decisions regarding violence, was himself a poor shot according to biographer Edmund Morgan. Like their English brethren in Virginia, New Englanders hoped to establish a peaceful and Protestant state in America that would be bi-racial and harmonious. They did not want to repeat the supposed evils of the Spanish in Mexico and South America, where Indians were killed and African slaves were imported to do hard labor.11 This idealism evaporated with the Jamestown Massacre of 1622; King Philip’s War ended idealism in New England. The war became one of ethnic cleansing.

For the most part, the New England Confederation could not lead and proved to be inept at winning the war against King Philip’s insurgency. Plymouth and the colonies in Connecticut chafed under centralized rule from Boston, while the New England militiamen often went home after fruitless patrols in the New England hinterlands. The one pitched battle of the entire conflict came during the Great Swamp Fight of December 1675. Here, about 1,000 militiamen from Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut “attacked a large, fortified Narragansett village located in the Great Swamp (present-day South Kingston, Rhode Island).”12 The New Englanders won the day, killing almost 100 hundred warriors. However, the battle brought the mighty Narragansett into the war, which spelled doom for Rhode Island (which never wanted the war). In the northern theater of Maine, the Wabanaki and their allies killed as many as 400 settlers and drove the New Englanders out of every settlement except for Casco and a few other coastal enclaves.

In terms of leadership, the New Englanders had only two competent commanders: Major Richard Waldron and Captain Benjamin Church. These men approached the war differently. Waldron was a rigid Puritan and one of the founders of Dover, New Hampshire (then part of the Massachusetts Bay). An experienced soldier, but brutal to Indians, Waldron oversaw the many tit-for-tat battles in Maine and New Hampshire. His militiamen sought pitched battles with their foes. Church, on the other hand, came from Plymouth Colony, worked as a carpenter, and speculated in land in Rhode Island. Church believed in maneuverability. Unlike other New England leaders, Church also believed in using Indian allies and training his New England militiamen to fight like Indians. Church’s force would be the first ever Ranger unit in American history. Church’s small band of fighters finally killed King Philip in August 1676, thus essentially ending the war.

Benjamin Church is often seen as the preeminent figure of the war because he left behind a diary. This diary, besides detailing Church’s friendly relations with Indians (including a possibly sexual relationship with a female sachem) and his frustrations with the Puritan establishment in Boston, became one of the most popular documents in the Early American Republic. According to literature professor Philip Gould, Church’s diary was emblematic of the Early Republic’s search for “virtue” and “republicanism.” In short, from the Revolution to the age of Jackson, Church was upheld as the quintessential American: a carpenter who grabbed his gun in order to protect his civilization.13 Church would later serve in King William’s War (1688–1697) and Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713) until dying at age seventy-eight (some sources say seventy-nine).

Whereas Church’s diary is filled with information about troop movements, sit-downs with Indians, and the like, King Philip’s War also produced another eyewitness account. Mary Rowlandson of Lancaster, Massachusetts was captured by Indian raiders on February 10th, 1675. Her captivity lasted for eleven weeks and five days.14 During that time Rowlandson and her fellow New England captives endured treks through the Massachusetts frontier, southern Vermont, and New Hampshire. Rowlandson’s diary, later published as The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, became an early best-seller. She details how attacking Indians killed her entire family before kidnapping her and her six-year-old daughter, Sarah.

But out we must go, the fire increasing, and coming along behind us, roaring, and the Indians gaping before us with their guns, spears, and hatchets, to devour us. No sooner were we out of the house, but my brother-in-law (being before wounded, in defending the house, in or near the throat) fell down dead, whereat the Indians scornfully shouted, hallooed, and were presently upon him, stripping off his clothes.15

Sarah would tragically die during captivity. Rowlandson’s deliverance would come thanks to the women of Boston who purchased her ransom. Although made a slave to an Indian leader and forced to listen to her captors describe the killing of New England militiamen, Rowlandson was at least spared the fate of colonial New England’s other famous heroine, Anne Hutchinson. After being banished from Boston for preaching Antinomianism, Hutchinson and her family relocated to New Netherland. There, in the summer of 1643, Anne and her entire family were scalped by an Algonquian tribe during Kieft’s War (1643–1645). The tribe sought revenge on Dutch settlers, but wound up killing English ones instead.

The story of King Philip’s War is the story of American survival. Despite Jill Lepore’s lazy assertion in The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, the war did not see New Englanders develop a separate identity as Americans. If anything, after the war, English America moved closer to the metropole. England returned the favor by sending more government officials and curtailing the liberties that had been established by the original charters. Indeed, by the time of the American Revolution, Americans in the North and South saw themselves as British and happily invoked King George III and the traditions of monarchy against the illegal activities of the Parliament in London. No, the lesson of King Philip’s War is not that it created a separate American identity, but that it established New England as a thoroughly English civilization. No tribal alliance would never again seriously threaten Massachusetts or Connecticut, thus allowing for the full flowering of Anglo-Saxon culture on these shores.

Most important of all, the key lesson of King Philip’s War is that every inch of New England, and indeed America, was fought over and won by the Historic American Nation. The Puritans suffered tremendous loses, but ultimately managed to win the day by defending their towns and innovating new ways of warfare (rangering). The next time some rioting Antifa type or racial grievance brigade member says that their people “built this country,” remind them of King Philip’s War and tell them: No, we fought for it and died for it, and it will always be our civilization.

The American Conquistador

American Renaissance, July 17th, 2020.

Back before America became a nation of self-hating post-nationalists, our civilization believed in Manifest Destiny. First uttered in 1845 by John L. O’Sullivan, the founder and editor of the United States Democratic Review in New York, the notion of Manifest Destiny envisioned a United States that connected the Pacific and the Atlantic. Manifest Destiny similarly believed that “white Anglo-Saxons . . . were preordained to spread civilization across the vast continent for the sake of its cultural and economic advancement.”16 Manifest Destiny was, in a sense, a Yankee version of Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolivar’s pan-Americanism.

Perhaps no figure embodied the spirit of Manifest Destiny like the “gray-eyed man of destiny,” William Walker. Barely remembered in the United States, Walker is today reviled in Central America. The Marxist Sandinistas of Nicaragua (whose politics have been praised by Senator Bernie Sanders) instruct their children about how Walker was the first Yankee “imperialist” to invade their tranquil home.17 A film about Walker was released in 1987. Directed by British leftist Mr. Alex Cox, Walker is a surreal send-up of Washington’s then current involvement in the civil war in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Latin America. Cox turned Walker into a gaslit Rambo or a more venomous, less satirical Mr. Freedom. This is the general view of Walker: a bogeyman and a pirate hellbent on turning Latin America into series of US protectorates.

But was William Walker truly the embodiment of the “unique evil” of American imperialism? In some ways, Walker was an American Alexander the Great, with a private army called the American Phalanx. Walker’s designs for Central America were far greater than Manifest Destiny too, with Walker aspiring to create an independent republic uniting Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.18 The Walker story is complicated, full of incredible heroics and terrible betrayals of justice, and has a legacy that has endured in subtle ways up to the present.

Born on May 8th, 1824 as the first of six children to Scottish immigrant James S. Walker and his Kentucky-born bride Mary Norvell Walker, William Walker grew up in the frontier city of Nashville, Tennessee. The Walker family belonged to Nashville’s commercial upper crust, with the elder Walker making his fortune in steamboats.19 Other members of the family were equally distinguished: maternal grandfather Lipscomb Norvell was a veteran of the Continental Army who fought at Trenton and Monmouth, while several of William’s uncles and cousins fought the British during the War of 1812 or the Mexicans during the Texas Revolution. The family was a proud and illustrious one, and young William never went hungry nor did he ever experience deprivations of any kind.

The eldest Walker child proved intelligent and dedicated to his studies. He enrolled at the University of Nashville at age of thirteen. There he studied Greek, Latin, trigonometry, international law, medicine, and other subjects. Walker also participated in the Agatheridan Society (a literary debate club) and proved to be a devout Christian. He graduated summa cum laude in October 1838 at the ripe age of fourteen. From there Walker matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied medicine. In 1843, after completing his studies with a dissertation on the human iris, Walker traveled throughout Europe thanks to a generous allowance from his family. Walker spent the better part of two years in Paris, which helped him to recognize the superiority of American notions of individual liberty over the “popish” tendencies of the French.20

Upon returning to the United States, Walker decided to alter his career path by switching to law. He began by studying the Tennessee law code under Nashville attorney James Whitworth. Then, after giving up Nashville for New Orleans, Walker committed to memory French civil codes, which continue to serve as the founding principles of Louisiana law. Soon enough Walker offered his legal services to the citizens of the Crescent City, but few seemed interested. This required another career change, and by 1849, Walker owned a share in the Daily Crescent newspaper. As editor, Walker’s Daily Crescent took a moderate line on the issue of slavery. The paper was more noteworthy for its contentious and very public battles with rival newspaper, the Delta.

It is not known for sure when and where Walker became enamored with the idea of military adventurism, but the idea of “filibustering,” or mercenary work, was then popular in the United States. In 1819, James Long of Tennessee, after serving in the US Army during the War of 1812, took several volunteers from Natchez, Mississippi, and with the backing of that city’s merchant class, tried to conquer Mexican Texas. The Long Expedition ended in dismal failure. Texas became an independent republic thanks to American settlers who formed self-defense militias to protect their lives and property from both marauding Comanches and eventually the Mexican Army. While Walker lived in New Orleans, Americans in both the North and South voiced support for Cuban revolutionary Narciso Lopez, who used American filibusters during several botched attempts to wrest Cuba from the Spanish crown. Before his execution at the hands of Spanish authorities, Lopez’s chief desire was to see Cuba annexed by the United States, preferably as a slave-owning state.21

Walker clearly harbored dreams of adventure. This would explain why, before the age of thirty and without military training of any kind, he organized the short-lived conquest of the Mexican state of Sonora. In 1853, Walker and about one hundred men left San Francisco for Baja California. They told the US government that they planned on working in the mines of Sonora, but in reality, the men carried rifles, pistols, and knives instead of pickaxes. At the time, Northern Mexico was a desolate place where roving Apache bands terrorized villagers and the wealthy rancheros alike. The corrupt central government in Mexico City could not do much about it except offer generous settlement grants to foreigners, especially German and French settlers who were seen as more trustworthy than land-hungry Yankees.

Walker justified his military adventure as a civilizing mission designed to protect innocent Mexicans from the ravages of Apache raids. Not long after leaving the commercial ship Caroline, Walker’s small war band took the city of La Paz without much of a fight. From there, the First Independent Battalion (the name Walker gave to his army) marched into the desert. Their new country, the Republic of Lower California, was declared free and sovereign of Mexico. By November 1853, the Republic of Lower California was renamed as the Republic of Sonora. Walker became the first president and instituted the Civil Code of Louisiana as the new state’s law. Tellingly, this meant that the Republic of Sonora legalized slavery while it remained illegal in the rest of Mexico. This was never put in practice, as Walker’s professed claim to control all of Sonora and the Baja Peninsula was not based on reality.22

The independent Republic of Sonora would only last until May 1854. Despite enjoying a recruiting office in San Francisco, Walker’s army never amounted to much. These mostly untrained volunteers engaged in more looting than fighting, and when they did fight, they tended to skirmish with a hodgepodge of local Mexican militia, Indian warriors, and professional soldiers. Arguably Walker’s most powerful enemy was the administration of President Franklin Pierce, which saw Walker’s actions as at best a nuisance and at worst a direct violation of America’s Neutrality Act of 1818. Walker would be charged with violations of the Neutrality Act in San Francisco after his Republic of Sonora fell due to a combination of military resistance led by Sonoran rancher Antonio Maria Melendrez and political pressure by General John E. Wool, the head of US forces on the Pacific coast.23 The final remnants of Walker’s ragtag army surrendered to the US Army in San Diego. If the US government hoped that the failure of the Republic of Sonora would stop Walker from pursuing future filibustering campaigns, he proved them wrong almost immediately.

Besides Panama, the other Central American country prized by American industrialists was Nicaragua. Thanks to many inland waterways, including the San Juan River that empties into the Caribbean at San Juan del Norte, men like Cornelius Vanderbilt dreamed of building a canal in Nicaragua to link the Atlantic and Pacific. Even without a canal, American companies like the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and especially the Accessory Transit Company made good money moving men and supplies across Nicaragua. As a result, Nicaragua’s port cities and inland trading posts had a sizable American community in the 1850s. No city boasted of more Americans than Greytown on the Atlantic coast, which belonged to the Mosquito Kingdom, a protectorate of the British Empire ruled by English-speaking Indians.

The biggest problem with making money in Nicaragua was the country’s terminal civil strife. Ever since declaring independence from Spain, Nicaragua had been fought over by the Legitimist conservatives based in the city of Granada and the Liberals headquartered in Leon. As much a familial and municipal feud as a political one, the cycle of civil wars between the Legitimists and Liberals would last well into the twentieth century and require several US military interventions.24 Thanks to an election in 1853 that produced no single majority, Nicaragua devolved into civil war once again. From their sanctuary in Honduras, the Liberals under the leadership of Francisco Castellon and Maximo Jerez sought foreign volunteers for their army. Many Americans answered the call, including Walker. After selling his shares in the San Francisco Commercial Advertiser newspaper, Walker and two San Francisco notables approached Castellon and reached an agreement whereby the Americans were given 21,000 acres of land and military wages provided that they could recruit and command an army of 300 men against Granada.25 Walker took command of this force, the American Phalanx, and although its first incarnation stood at barely over 150 men, it was sent into battle immediately. The bloody birth of the Phalanx occurred at the First Battle of Rivas, where an initially successful American charge was repulsed by the Legitimist defenders. Several of Walker’s officers were killed in the repeated attempts to overrun the barricades at Rivas.

Not deterred by their failure at Rivas, the Phalanx moved back to the Pacific coast where they enjoyed the use of several commandeered ships. Thanks to his independent command, Walker followed a different plan from the one preferred by his Liberal peers. Walker recognized that controlling the river routes to the ocean was vital as it not only allowed him to pillage the supply depots controlled by the Accessory Transit Company (therefore showing the lie in the left-wing belief that Walker was an agent of American capital and financial interests), but it also allowed for new volunteers to be safely shipped in from New Orleans, San Francisco, and New York. According to his own records, Walker’s Phalanx in Nicaragua between January and April 1857 included 1,072 soldiers (excluding 250 officers). Of this a majority were from New York (174) and Louisiana (77), and most had signed up for service in San Francisco (189).26 Given this fact, the myth that Walker was the vanguard of Southern expansionism is untenable as most of his men came from non-slaveholding regions of the US.

Barring a few veterans of the Mexican American War and professional mercenaries like Charles Henningsen, the Phalanx relied on raw recruits supplied with their own weapons, food, and clothing. Desertion was endemic, plus outbreaks of cholera which ravaged not only the Phalanx but also the Legitimist army and the armies of Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala. However, despite leading a lackluster force, the Phalanx won the day at the Battle of Virgin Bay, where about 150 Phalanx soldiers defeated a larger Legitimist force that they cut to ribbons thanks to superior rifles. The loss at Virgin Bay caused the Legitimist army to question the competency of their commander, General Jose Santos Guardiola. What broke the army’s will and resolve to fight was Walker’s capture of Granada, which was accomplished thanks to Walker’s use of commercial ships as both naval weapons and ferrying tools. With Granada as a bargaining chip, Walker threatened to level the town and kill Legitimist families unless the conservatives agreed to form a provisional government that included both Legitimists and Liberals.

The provisional government would not last long. The financially exhausted Nicaraguans could not stop Walker’s quick takeover of the country. Because both the Legitimists and Liberals relied on conscripts, Walker’s decision to end conscription in the country meant that the only standing military force left was his own. Similarly, following Walker’s demand that Nicaragua hold a general election in order to name a new official government, both the Legitimists and the Liberals, the latter of whom grew disenchanted with the American following a series of summary executions of Legitimist officials and Liberal traitors, boycotted the elections. This made it a fait accompli that William Walker would be named as the new president of Nicaragua. This decision galvanized the conservative governments of Nicaragua’s neighbors. Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica joined forces with the remnants of Nicaragua’s two armies to remove all of Walker’s 850 armed men from Central America. The Central Americans rallied to the cause along racial lines, saying that Walker’s intent was to supplant the mixed-race nations of Central America with a White one from the north (i.e., the US).27 Walker did indeed see his crusade as a racial one, arguing that his army, which represented naturalized citizens of Nicaragua, had the right to rule the land not only because they had shed their blood to win it, but because generations of misuse of the land and economy by the locals required an injection of Anglo-Saxon civilization in order to set it right. The war to remove President Walker became a war of extermination, with innocent American and European merchants and farmers targeted for execution by Costa Rican soldiers.28

Cornelis Vanderbilt also entered the fray as the most powerful member of the anti-Walker coalition. Opposed to filibustering and incensed at Walker’s expropriation of Accessory Transit Company property, Vanderbilt hired a New York ruffian and former murder suspect named Sylvanus Spencer to retake Walker’s purloined ships one by one. Spencer did his job well, and his crew of 120 Costa Rican soldiers successfully destroyed Walker’s ad-hoc navy while the Phalanx was fighting for its life against thousands of Central American soldiers. Without an escape route to the sea, Walker’s men were forced to abandon Granada after a grueling siege where Henningsen’s small squadron defended a single church in the city square for two weeks against a much larger force commanded by Salvadoran General Ramon Belloso.29

Fighting retreats, disease, and desertion decimated Walker’s army. On May 1st, 1857, Walker and his coterie of soldiers, POWs, and armed Nicaraguan loyalists surrendered to Captain Charles H. Davis of the US Navy. The undaunted Walker returned to New Orleans still proclaiming himself as the legitimate president of Nicaragua. He still lusted after military adventure, too. After giving lectures across New Orleans, San Francisco, and New York, Walker was approached by a representative of the Bay Islands. Located off the coast of Honduras, the Bay Islands belonged to the British Empire as part of their Mosquito Kingdom protectorate. However, in 1860, London signaled to Honduras that it wanted to give up the islands so long as Tegucigalpa agreed to respect the rights and liberties of the British citizens living on the islands. London encouraged the islanders to relocate to Jamaica or Barbados, but instead a delegate from the town of Coxen Hole asked Walker to assemble a new force to act as a line of defense against Honduras. Walker agreed.

In June 1860, Walker’s expedition set off from their base at Cozumel, Mexico and planned to land at Coxen Hole. Patrolling Royal Navy ships convinced Walker to land at Trujillo on the Honduran mainland instead. There, Walker’s men stormed Fortaleza de Santa Barbara and took it with a minor loss of life. Although it sent the Honduran army out of Trujillo, Walker’s seizure of the fort was a pyrrhic victory. Offshore, Commander Nowell Salmon of the Royal Navy threatened to unleash his guns on the Americans. When Walker agreed to surrender to Salmon as a representative of the British crown, the Tennessee filibuster ended his final campaign. Sadly for Walker, Salmon used sub-terfuge in handing Walker and an officer over to the Hondurans. Since Walker continued to claim that he was the rightful president of Nicaragua, Commander Salmon forced Walker into Honduran custody on charges of an unlawful declaration of war against a peaceful neighbor. On September 12th, 1860, a Honduran firing squad executed the thirty-six-year-old William Walker.

Of the few people who ever recorded their personal interactions with Walker, all agreed that his dream was to build an English-speaking empire in Central America. As a dictator, Walker would establish an independent republic that would offer a regional alternative to both the US and the British Empire. Walker’s support for slavery was multi-faceted. On the one hand it was based in realpolitik—Walker understood that a slave-owning Central American republic could more easily conduct trade with the South and attract Southern immigrants. Walker also believed in the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization, saying that the “half caste” majority of Nicaragua as well as Africans only enjoyed the “teaching of the arts of life” thanks to White Europeans.30 Despite this contempt for Latin America and its multi-racial civilization, Walker felt strongly that he had become a citizen of Nicaragua and believed sincerely that his government had improved daily life for the average Nicaraguan. Walker even converted to Catholicism to show his commitment to his adoptive country.

One year before Walker’s death, his ideal of a Southern-style republic in Central America was echoed by George Bickley, a quack Cincinnati doctor who formed the Knights of the Golden Circle after a failed filibustering expedition to Mexico. The Knights sought to create the so-called “Golden Circle,” a Southern dominion of slave-owning governments in the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico. An 1861 book penned by an anonymous member of the secret society even claimed Walker as a member.31

After the Civil War, thousands of Southerners sought to follow Walker’s lead by relocating to Latin America as a favorable alternative to Northern tyranny. Confederate veterans established colonies like New Virginia in Mexico or Americana in Brazil. The latter still enjoys celebrating its Southern history and heritage, which saw 10,000 Southern immigrants establish Protestant churches and modern agricultural techniques in the impoverished Brazilian jungle. Frank McMullen, a veteran of Walker’s war in Nicaragua, was the Texan most responsible for the Southern presence in Brazil.

Like the lion Walker, approximately 5,000 Southerners, many of whom were fresh from Civil War battlefields like General John B. Magruder, pledged loyalty to Emperor Maximilian of Mexico and fought bravely for his empire. A similar Confederate veteran was an ancestor of this writer, who went from mercenary service in Mexico to a generalship in the army of the Khedive of Egypt.

All these men were imbued with the spirit of William Walker—America’s very own conquistador. Given that as recently as 2018, some Bay Islanders petitioned to return to the British Commonwealth, maybe Walker’s dream isn’t dead but waiting for a figurehead with the courage and gall to carve out a private kingdom.

The American Empire versus Islamism

American “isolationism” never really existed. The myth of isolationism often obscures the US Navy’s long history of small-scale expeditions done in the name of commerce and civilization. However, an older America had a much saner and more limited foreign policy—a foreign policy based around protecting the Western Hemisphere and keeping the shipping lanes open. A foreign policy like this, which privileges the Navy over the Army, could easily return America to its lost greatness.32

One of the other great myths of the modern world is that America is not and has never been at war with Islam. Any serious student of history can spy the deep-seated lie almost immediately. The West, which used to be just called Christendom, has been in conflict with the Prophet Muhammad since his religion stormed out of the Arabian deserts in the seventh century. Few students today know or care that the Middle East and North Africa that the Islamic hordes conquered was culturally Roman, ethnically Berber and Levantine, and religiously Christian.33 Of course, it also goes without saying that the Umayyad conquest of Spain was an act of cultural destruction that forever cut the advanced Hispano-Visigoths from history. Rather than bring with them Aristotle or the genius of Indian or Persian mathematics, the Islamic invaders stopped a Christian and Romanized culture from reaching its full potential. The Berber-Arab invaders knew that they had defeated a superior civilization. Recognizing this, many if not most of the Islamic rulers of Spain were the fair-haired offspring of Christian slave women.34

Centuries later, Islam had not changed much. The new Islamic power, Ottoman Turkey, had twice threatened Western Europe at the gates of Vienna before being repulsed by a Christian coalition. By the earl nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was clearly in decline. However, thanks to their ports in North Africa and their territories in the Balkans and East Africa, Constantinople (the Turkish capital did not become Istanbul until the twentieth century) continued on with its lucrative slave trade without much in the way of interference.35

Enter a new power—the secular and liberal United States of America. Influenced by the Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish championing of capitalist enterprise, Washington, D.C. quickly began a campaign of international trade. This provided the centerpiece for early American foreign policy, and the small US Navy became the chief disseminator of America economic power abroad. Unfortunately, unlike the British Royal Navy, the fledging American Navy could not fully guarantee the safety of US citizens involved in the Mediterranean Sea trade. Such a limitation proved fatal due to the Ottoman policy of state-sponsored piracy.

Realizing the weakness of the new Atlantic power, the independent Sultanate of Morocco and the Ottoman Beylik of Tunis, Eyalet of Tripolitania, and the Regency of Algiers stepped up their campaign of raiding merchant ships and taking crews hostage. Many of these sailors became slaves for the “Sublime Porte.” Realizing that American commerce would be adversely affected by continuous piracy, Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison decided to act with force.

The most famous event of both the First and Second Barbary Wars was the burning of the USS Philadelphia in February 1804. Five months earlier, Ottoman pirates had seized the frigate after it ran aground just outside of Tripoli’s main harbor. At the time, Commodore Edward Preble was launching constant naval attacks on the Barbary corsairs and was close to winning the war. However, when 307 American sailors fell into Barbary hands, Preble’s light at the end of the tunnel dimmed.

Convinced that the Philadelphia had to be destroyed. Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, Jr. volunteered for the dangerous mission. After nightfall on February 16th, 1804, Decatur’s ship the Intrepid crept into Tripoli’s harbor. Decatur’s men dressed up like Maltese and Arab pirates and boarded the Philadelphia. Without losing a single man, the Intrepid’s raiding party managed to free the American hostages and kill about twenty Tripolitan pirates.36 While the war would drag on, and the USS Constitution (which remains in active service today) was called upon to win the Second Battle of Tripoli Harbor, Decatur’s daring raid effectively took the starch out of the Muslim corsairs.

Many historians, especially those trained in the Marxist style of complete materialism, consider the Barbary Wars nothing more than a commerce conflict. It is believed that America was inspired by economics, not religion or even national pride. However, President Thomas Jefferson knew full well that the Barbary pirates were animated by Islam more than the desire for wealth. In 1785, Jefferson and John Adams met Tripoli’s ambassador in London. During their chat, the American delegation broached the subject of Islamic piracy. Namely, they wanted to know why the men of North Africa felt justified in taking American and British ships. “It was written in the Koran,” the ambassador told them, “that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their [Muslim] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”37

Such disdain for non-believers was repeated again later in the 1830s when the US Navy was called in to deal with another set of Islamic pirates. This time the battleground was in Asia, specifically the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia). Erroneously considered a bastion of “progressive” or at least “tolerant” Islam, Indonesia, then as now, belonged to Sunni Islamists.38 Prior to the two expeditions to Sumatra, American merchants, especially those based in Salem, Massachusetts, had a flourishing relationship with the Aceh Sultanate, one of the world’s greatest exporters of pepper. In February 1831, the vessel Friendship, which was owned by the wealthy Salem shipbuilder Joseph Peabody, was attacked by local pirates who killed the ship’s first officer and two crew members. Yet another hostage situation developed.

Fortunately for the crew of the Friendship, three US ships—the Palmer, the James Monroe, and the Governor Endicott—were armed and in the area. Their appearance scared off the pirates and the Friendship ultimately made it back to Salem.

An outraged President Andrew Jackson decided that such villainy could not stand. He ordered Commodore John Downes to redirect his ship from Brazil to Kuala Batee, the location of the Friendship’s ordeal. On February 6th, 1832, the Potomac, which had been disguised as a Dutch merchant vessel, attacked Kuala Batee with a sustained bombardment and the deployment of some 282 Marines.39 About 100 Sumatrans died in the battle, while the area’s defenses lay in ruins. A similarly punitive expedition was carried out between December 1838 and January 1839 after Muslim Malay pirates of the Aceh Sultanate once again attacked another American merchant vessel.

While some have characterized these sea-based battles as early skirmishes in the long War on Terror, the truth is that the US’s first sustained contact with Islamic fighters did not occur until 1901. At that time, the US had already become an imperial power, with Puerto Rico, Guam, the Panama Canal, and the Philippines all under direct US control. The relative ease of the Spanish-American War gave way to the brutish jungle fighting of the Philippine-American War of 1899. Until 1902, US soldiers fought a Filipino insurgency that utilized guerrilla tactics that eerily presaged the Vietminh and the Vietcong. Unlike the later Indochina War, the US military successfully pacified the Philippines, but at a terrible cost. Over 6,000 Americans were killed, while approximately 20,000 Filipinos died. The US also practiced the “water cure,” a type of early waterboarding, in order to break the will of the guerrillas.

Even before the larger war could be resolved, a second front opened on the Muslim majority island of Mindanao. Here, Moro rebels, whom the Spanish called “Moros” because they reminded them of their old Moorish enemies from Morocco, Tunis, and Algiers, took up arms against their new masters. American military leaders feared that the Moros, who practiced polygamy and the use of “infidel” slaves, would treat the American troops like they did the Spanish by capturing lone grunts, torturing them for hours in the jungle, emasculating them, and burning them alive.40

The fearsome Moro tribesmen utilized suicide attacks made by amoks, berserker-like Muslim warriors. Such people proved unwilling to be “civilized” by President William McKinley and President Theodore Roosevelt. The notion of American civilization and attendant Protestant Christianity was anathema to the Moros and the people of the Sulu Archipelago. They saw no reason to change their traditional habits of pillaging, internecine warfare, piracy, and slave-taking.

Therefore, not long after US Marines landed at Zamboanga, members of the Moro Maranaos tribe began attacking American jungle camps. By 1902, Juramentados, or Muslim warriors who had sworn an oath to attack all opponents of Islam, began harassing US military patrols all over Mindanao. The Juramentados were feared for their bravery and zealotry. One of their number even managed to take several revolver rounds before he successfully chopped off an American officer’s legs. (The ineffectiveness of the standard issue .38 Long Colt against Moro warriors led to the adoption of the .45 ACP round by the US military.)

Ultimately, a new military commander, the old Indian fighter Captain John J. Pershing, found the right formula against the Moros. Believing that the Muslim warriors only respected force, Pershing pursued a hammer-fisted policy against the rebels. At every opportunity, American forces used artillery to bombard Moro cotas, or wood and bamboo forts, before mopping up all resistance with infantry charges. “Civilize ‘em with the Krag” became the motto of Pershing’s men.

Pershing’s successor, Major General Leonard Wood, continued the program of aggressive jungle probes combined with attempts to integrate his men with the local Moro communities. As the military governor of Mindanao, Wood faced multiple tribal rebellions that resulted in over 100 expeditions to Jolo and beyond. Wood’s biggest moment in the Philippines came when his forces climbed 2,000 feet in order to take on 600 Moros hunkered down in the extinct volcano at Bud Dajo. Although the American press would characterize this battle as too savage, Wood won the day.

Until 1913, when between 6,000 and 10,000 Moro warriors made their last stand against the Americans at Bud Bagsak, the Moro Rebellion stayed as nothing more than low-level insurgency. America’s ultimate victory there proved fleeting. Today, under the rule of Manila, Mindanao and the majority Muslim provinces of the south continue to bedevil the Philippine security forces, who often rely on American military aid. As was the case in Tripoli, Sumatra, and Jolo City, Islam remains the animating force of the opposition. The deadly siege of Marawi in 2017, which displaced 120,000 after the ISIS-linked Maute Group briefly captured the city,41 is the most vicious and visceral example of Islam’s power within the Pax Americana.

Islamic State in the Victorian Era

American Renaissance, March 29th, 2019.

We’ve fought with many men acrost the seas,

An’ some of ’em was brave an’ some was not:

The Paythan an’ the Zulu an’ Burmese;

But the Fuzzy was the finest o’ the lot.

We never got a ha’porth’s change of ’im:

’E squatted in the scrub an’ ’ocked our ’orses,

’E cut our sentries up at Sua~kim~,

An’ ’e played the cat an’ banjo with our forces.

So ’ere’s ~to~ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ’ome in the Soudan; You’re a pore benighted ’eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;

—“Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” Rudyard Kipling (1892)

Rudyard Kipling, the great bard of British imperialism, echoed the sentiment of many British fighting men in his poem “Fuzzy-Wuzzy.” But who were the Fuzzy-Wuzzy who “was the finest o’ the lot” when it came to the enemies of the British Army? The answer: the Beja tribesmen of Sudan. Renowned for their pastoralism, fierce independence, and their elaborate and wild-looking hairstyles, the Beja and other Sudanese tribes battled the Anglo-Egyptian army between 1883 and 1899. During that protracted war, the fearless Beja frequently rode hard and fast directly into the teeth of British military steel armed only with spears and small swords. The reason? The Beja scorned men who used firearms, plus, during the late nineteenth century, the Beja pledged their loyalty to Mohammed Ahmed, the professed Mahdi of Islam.

In Michael Asher’s excellent book, Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure, the Beja, specifically the “ethnically pure” Amarar, claim descent from Noah’s son Ham and may be related to “the same pre-dynastic stock from which the ancestors of the pharaohs had sprung.”42 While recent genetic testing calls this assertion into question, there is no doubt that the Beja are an ancient people with a long tradition of rugged liberty. In 1880 or 1881, the Beja and other Sudanese tribes rallied around a humble worker with little religious teaching. That worker was Mohammed Ahmed, who had been proclaimed as the savior of Islam (Mahdi) by a wandering holy man (feki) from Darfur named Abdallahi wad Torshayn.43 Neither Ahmad nor Abdallahi came from one of the powerful tribes of the Sudan, with Ahmed being a Danagla and Abdallahi belonging to the hated Ta’isha clan of the Baggara nomads.44 Despite this handicap, the declaration of the Mahdi drew thousands of Sudanese to Ahmed, and from there he and his inner circle began demanding a purification of their lands and a return to the “pure” Islam of the seventh century.

The first target of Mahdist rage was the ruling Turco-Egyptian elite. Venal and corrupt, Ottoman officials in the Sudan had few friends among the Sudanese or the British. For the dervishes (the Western name for Mahdist soldiers), the Turco-Egyptian bureaucrats were apostates—Sunni Muslims who did not truly practice or appreciate the faith. Even worse, many non-Muslims, including Jews and Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian Christians, could be found in the Ottoman civil service.

Unfortunately, for the Khedive of Egypt, Tewfik, his government could not just let Sudan rot. Tewfik’s ancestor, the great Muhammad Ali, had conquered much of the Sudan in 1822. Since then, the Sudan was a colony of a colony (Egypt remained a nominal province of the Ottoman Empire until the late nineteenth century), and despite the fact that Sudan was not an economic engine or vitally important to protecting Egypt’s southern border, Cairo felt the need to maintain its hegemony south of the Sahara. Therefore, in 1883, Tewfik sent an expeditionary force into the Sudan to put down the Muslim insurgency.

The expedition that reached the Sudan in that year included 8,300 infantrymen, 2,000 cavalry troops, sixteen Krupp mountain-guns, and numerous Nordenfeldt machine-guns.45 This modern force was led by a cadre of European officers, including Major Baron Gotz von Seckendorff of Prussia, Major Arthur Herlth of Austria-Hungary, and Valentine Baker, a former officer of Britain’s 10th Hussars who had been forced to leave the service following a sex scandal. The overall commander was William Hicks, aka Hicks Pasha. A veteran of the British East India Company’s Bombay Army, Hicks had cut his teeth during the genocidal fighting in the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Between 1867 and 1868, Hicks had been a general during Britain’s Abyssinian Expedition, which successfully punished Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia for imprisoning European missionaries. Hicks was one of many European military men lured to Egypt with promises of wealth and status as members of the modernizing army.

Despite great equipment and capable generals, the expeditionary of 1883 was nothing more than a paper tiger. Most of the men in Hicks’s army had been conscripted into service, and these Egyptian peasants (fellahin) were known to mutilate themselves to avoid serving in the Sudan. Unsurprisingly, when Mohammed Ahmed’s 40,000 dervishes ambushed Hicks’s force at El Obeid in November 1883, thousands of Egyptian soldiers dropped their weapons and fled. Others begged for their lives and hoped that their Muslim faith would spare them from a gruesome death. Many of these men would be stripped naked and sold as slaves in Mahdist markets.

As for Hicks and the Europeans, history records that they went down fighting. Gustav Klootz, the German socialist and deserter who betrayed Hicks’s men to the dervishes, said years later that Hicks and the other Europeans killed several enemies before finally dying themselves. Sheikh Ali Gulla, a dervish veteran of the battle, claimed that Hicks “was full of courage like an elephant.”46 The British general apparently emptied and reloaded his revolver three times, then, after exhausting his last bullets, Hicks charged into the middle of a dervish column and fought them with his sword. Hicks’s heroics, along with the bravery of the other White officers, impressed the Beja warriors but did not stop them from mutilating Hicks and Seckendorff after their deaths.

The news of the Hicks Expedition’s slaughter triggered a panic in Cairo. British military and civilian leaders, who had wielded the only real authority in the country since 1882, were conflicted over what to do about the Mahdist revolt. Sir Evelyn Baring (the future Lord Cromer) thought that Sudan should go to the dogs. After all, Egypt’s economy was still in shambles, and Sir Evelyn thought that it was in Britain’s interest to clean up Cairo’s coffers before undertaking any kind of punitive expedition. This sentiment was, for a time, echoed by Lieutenant General Lord Garnet Wolseley, the very same man who had won Egypt in the first place.