The Rule of the Wolves (A Memorial Day Message)

By Wayne Allensworth

The deer have spotted me. They freeze for an instant, then go about their business, even as their eyes are subtly fixed on the human figure in the distance. I slowly move away from them, and they trot off into the distance. I come out to watch them in the mornings, their ever present, subtle grace, the stately solitude of their presence. The only sound the cooing of the dove.

Out in the pasture I see a tom turkey flare up, spreading his fan of feathers for a hen. I stand still behind a mesquite tree and watch until they both take off, flying away and over a fence into the next pasture. I walk on, up and over a hill and I see one of those enigmatic black squirrels that live in the Hill Country, so plump I thought it was a cat at first, sitting on a ledge of rocks, and the tall, pointed ears of a fox, its bushy tail following after as it glides through the brush. Cardinals fly between the broad canopies of live oaks. And the creek continues its silent run.

It’s a clear, surprisingly cool morning in May, the shadows dissipating as the sun’s rays spread over the rocky hills, breaking through into the creek beds and pastures.

No cell phone, no computer. No reminders, no alarms. And you can almost forget about the madness that seems to have engulfed every corner of the world, madness that seems so pressing, so urgent, so immediate. Crisis is our mode of living. We have become addicted to the constant stimulation of the frantic media fright fest, a circus of manipulative terror many of us have also grown to love. If, that is, you pay attention to the steady stream of propaganda that gushes 24/7, flooding our sensibilities via the electronic, digitized cocoon we have encased ourselves in.

Out here, it doesn’t exist, it’s just noise. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it…But I know that I’ll have to return to the madhouse, where the worst of its inmates have purposefully been released by the wardens themselves. Another planned crisis providing another opportunity for them—C.S. Lewis’s “conditioners,” James Burnham’s “managers”—to expand their power over us in order to solve problems they themselves have created by previous manipulative acts.

Call them what you like: the conditioners, the managers, the elite, the ruling class. The late Joseph Sobran came closer to the truth when he called them “the wolves.” And there is no escaping them.

Sobran once commented that the wolves always rule. It was Joe’s lament, his resigned recognition that the world he dreamed of, one of autonomous, but interconnected, cooperative communities of families, small businesses, and farms, one into which the state seldom intruded, one in which the faith and organic culture flourished and set the parameters for our lives, would not come to pass. If it ever had existed in a pure form, that was but a fleeting moment. Joe was a constitutionalist, a persuasion that now seems archaic, as dated as McGuffey’s Readers or little houses on the prairie. He sadly acknowledged that the great document itself was an artifact of a particular place and time that couldn’t last. And it didn’t.

The wolves rule because they alone have the drive, the ruthless ambition, the single-minded will to power to forsake the common bonds between ordinary people, to disdain their small dreams and simple pleasures for the aphrodisiac provided by control, manipulation, and dominance over others. They will always find the ideology or religion or other justification that provides a rationalization for their sweeping, but quite petty tyrannies, based on all the “isms” I’ve come to despise.

If we are lucky, sometimes their rule does to some degree reflect the interests of the common folk. But as the state, then the corporate mass I call “The Blob,” expanded, along with the technologies that facilitate its ability to control and manipulate us, the wolves grew more distant, more detached from our reality. The lure of power became a vehicle that encouraged blind hubris. And here we are.

Sobran once asked me, for I was at the time an employee of the D.C. Swamp, “Why?” Why did “they” persist in seeking dragons to slay abroad, while neglecting myriad problems at home? My answer was quite simple—it was great fun. Clinking wine glasses at receptions in Brussels, meeting premiers and kings and the global oligarchs they so loved and admired. Playing Lawrence of Arabia or James Bond in distant lands of which they knew nothing, but which provided the venue for their self-important—and often self-righteous—adventures. Their “isms”—“liberalism,” “globalism,” “democratic capitalism”—provided them with a Grand Cause that justified their careers in the bureaucratic snake pit they thrived in. And that was the source of their resentment of the “patriarchal constructs” that had bound them and restricted their ambitions. What were the boring, mundane chores of everyday life, the small dreams of small people to them other than a stultifying form of oppression? 

Joe nodded. He knew the answer before I had said a word. He told me I should “write that,” and I replied that someday I would.

The rule of the Wolves was very much on my mind on Memorial Day. A steady stream of customary Memorial Day war movies was playing on TV, ranging from earnest Hollywood patriotic gore (think Sargeant York or Back to Bataan!) to the cynical bloodletting (The Dirty Dozen) and subversive parody (Kelly’s Heroes) of later years, all of them supposedly to honor the men who had “defended our freedom,” reducing real-life blood fests to slogans and abstractions. The only reason to fight what used to be called “foreign wars” is to defend ourselves. “Freedom” and “democracy” at home have nothing to do with it. Fighting, killing, and dying for abstractions abroad means endless war—the proverbial perpetual war for perpetual peace we seem locked into.

I’m as much in favor of honoring heroism and martial virtues as anyone. I grew up admiring Audie Murphy and have watched The Sands of Iwo Jima countless times. But it wasn’t the professional warriors—say, General George S. Patton—who attracted my admiration as much as it was the citizen soldiers of that era. They were ordinary men—the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker—who did extraordinary things. Having performed a dirty job, the survivors came home to go about their lives, some of them lives of quiet desperation. I knew them. They were my own family.

Yet I couldn’t help but think that the wars of the past or the present didn’t have anything to do with “our freedom.” In fact, what we now think of as the Deep State or the Swamp used those wars to restrict and circumscribe our actual liberties. The Deep State was created by war. War is, in fact, the health of the state, or, rather, of the contemporary Globalist Blob.

“Capitalist democracy” produces propaganda more effectively than any other system. Better than the fascists or communist dictatorships of the past. Modern technology, clever marketing, saturation media bombardment, and the persistent, illusory faith among our people that “our democracy” still belongs to us have seen to that. That faith in the subverted, and perverted, institutions of a now defunct republic is touching in its way. And it explains how the Wolves have successfully waved the flag at us like a bullfighter’s cape to induce war fever and prompt our young men—and now, God help us, our young women—to charge in the direction of foes the lupine denizens of the Swamp have been concocting for a long, long time.

The Wolves craved empire, so “Remember the Maine!,” which was most likely not sunk by the Spanish. But Mr. Hearst promised that he would furnish the war if his people in Cuba furnished the pictures. And through that war, “we” acquired the Philippines, which put us on a collision course with the Empire of the Rising Sun decades later.

We were assured that the Lusitania was not carrying munitions. That was another lie used to gin up war fever.

We wanted to believe that FDR’s administration hadn’t had clear indications of an impending Japanese attack. Once that attack took place, an attack the administration had done its best to provoke, we had no choice but to fight, and the White House had the war it had wanted all along.

“Our boys” trooped off to fight “limited wars” in Korea and Southeast Asia as the Wolves told us that if one domino fell, all would fall. Well, they did fall in SE Asia, and that collapse had no impact on our lives. Protecting those “dominoes,” however, cost us the lives of a lot of our young men, our sons and brothers and fathers. And the Deep State kept expanding.

They lied us into a pointless, catastrophic war in Iraq, then kept us in Afghanistan for twenty years, knowing full well the war was going nowhere.

Each war has inevitably led to another. The Blob created enemies while the Wolves’ pet pundits said we were obligated to defend American “credibility.” Now, the Wolves want us to believe that who rules over Sevastopol is a question of America’s “vital interest,” when any thinking person knows it is not and never has been.

Here is an important question that I’ve discussed with friends in recent years: Should our young people enlist in the military? Thanking them for their service is beside the point if they serve not their people but the Wolves. Our people have for too long emotionally cast the military as the last bastion of our values, the reciprocal containing all our history. Odd for a country that was once suspicious of “standing armies.”

And the military establishment now openly, clearly serves the Blob and its globalist aims. “Patriotism” has nothing to do with it.

Does anyone want their child to possibly die in another futile war that has nothing to do with us? Shouldn’t we discourage our young people from enlisting in the military? Some say “no” loudly and clearly to the first question and “yes” to the second. Others have a different view—we want our young people in the military. Should the “boots on the ground” be ordered to move against us, we hope and believe that they will refuse to do so. We hope, even as we pray that their lives aren’t squandered in a futile war to ensure the rights of “trans people” in some obscure backwater.

I don’t know the right answers in that debate. I do know that the Soviet regime finally collapsed in large part because Russian soldiers refused to fire on their own people during the failed August 1991 coup. And that’s something to think about, maybe even to hope for.

In the meantime, our people must begin reconsidering their history. Where they came from and where we wish to go. An end to foreign adventures and to militarism should be one of our aims. That’s the best way to honor the memory of the fallen. Perhaps we should also take more time to honor another kind of courage, one that wins no medals and one that is not recorded by the Wolves’ court historians. It’s more important than ever that we honor the everyday courage it takes to marry, have children, and raise a family in true, undistorted love of their people and the fear of God. That’s the best way to fight the Wolves. Our survival depends on that act of resistance. And in mounting that resistance we would also answer another survival question: Survival as what?