At Kent State University in Ohio on 4 May 1970 the American Empire's hired thugs, the National Guard, fixed bayonets, charged, and then opened fire on its own citisens. Those four Americans, by name, were Allison Krause, Jeffrey Glen Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder. Those wounded are, by name, Alan Canfora, John Cleary Thomas, Mark Grace, Dean Kahler, Joseph Lewis, Donald MacKenzie, James Dennis Russell, Robert Stamps, and Douglas Wrentmore. A few days later, on May 14, two black students were shot to death by the police and state troopers at Jackson State in Jackson Mississippi, though few people seem to remember that event. (The names: James Earl Green, age 17, and Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, age 21.) Although I was just a boy, I remember watching the Kent State massacre on TV, in my classroom in a public school. After watching the bloody events unfold, I got up from my desk, walked away, and never said the Pledge of Allegiance ever again. The Empire"s murderous attack at on private citisens at Waco, Texas, in 1992, simply furthered my distanciation from the Empire and from its noxious "Pledge".

I pledge allegiance to no state. Not now. Not ever. As Edward Abbey said, "Resist much, obey little."

What is the "Pledge of Allegiance"? Few Americans have any idea of its origins (in Yankee Boston), or its historical background. Yet "the Pledge" has come to supplant both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America in the minds of most Americans. How did the Pledge assume such centrality in our schools and national dogma? Why, if one must have a flag salute, would not the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution be part of it? The answer lies in the Pledge's birth at the hands of Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist (Marxist) who, in the late 1800s, promoted a socialist political agenda that included "a planned economy with political, social and economic equality for all."

The late 1800s saw a surge of socialist thought that centered on the primacy of the state ("statism"). One of the most prominent, if not bellicose, proponents of these progressivist socialist doctrines was a novelist named Edward Bellamy. Bellamy wrote a novel that eventually sold over a million copies and was translated in 20 countries abroad: Looking Backward. In Looking Backward the main character, Julian West, falls asleep in 1887 only to awaken in the year 2000. He finds an America where the means of production are owned by the state and everyone earns equal income. Jobs are assigned by the government to citizen-conscripts, who must work for the state from the age of 21 until retirement at 45. By now, you recognise this tripe for what it really is: Puritan ideology mixed with cultural Marxism to produce a radical egalitarianism never intended or espoused by our Founders.

Edward Bellamy had a cousin named Francis Bellamy. Together they advocated a social philosophy they called "Nationalism", by which they meant that the state should control all the means of production (as the Marxists would say). Edward and Francis Bellamy established 167 "Nationalist Clubs" all over America, and an offshoot of one of these clubs in Boston became known as "The Society for Christian Socialists", with Francis Bellamy as its Vice-President, formed to preach the gospel of radical egalitarianism. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Bellamys' grandfather was an associate of the famous Puritan, Jonathan Edwards.

Eventually Francis Bellamy met with the head of the National Education Association, William Torrey Harris. Harris, in turn, was bent upon centralised, compulsory, state education, with special attention paid to ensuring that the state schools indoctrinated their students rather than merely educate them. (In short, mind control.) What Harris called "substantial education" he defined as "the subsumption of the individual." In 1892, Harris pushed the NEA to promote a "National Public School Celebration, which would promote loyalty to both the state and its schools." The ideological agenda for this "celebration"? The Yankee religious magazine, The Youth's Companion. Who worked on The Youth's Companion? Francis Bellamy, the old socialist Puritan from Boston. At a speech during the "celebration", Bellamy preached that ""the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State."

To encourage a blind obedience and loyalty to the all-powerful state, Francis Bellamy wrote his "Pledge", basing it on the infamous "Oath of Allegiance" forced at bayonet point upon Southerners during Reconstruction. Bellamy"s all-powerful Leviathan of a state he called "the Republic".

The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the "republic for which it stands." ...And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation—the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches.

In other words, Bellamy was a direct descendant of Lincoln's Radical Republicans of the mid-1800s, and he took his statist loyalty pledge directly from the loyalty oaths forced upon Southerners after the War for Southern Independence. The "one nation, indivisible" phrase, was, therefore, particularly important to Bellamy, since the Confederate States of America, which had fought against the principles of the centralised monster state, had declared Lincoln's beloved (and illusory) "Union", divisible! After all, if secession were legal, Bellamy's hopes for a concentration of socialist power in the hands of an all-powerful, all-controlling state, would be dashed. Thomas DiLorenzo notes that "This was the thinking of all the worst tyrants of the twentieth century, including Hitler and Stalin. (Hitler even quoted approvingly Lincoln's "union created the states" theory from his first inaugural address in Mein Kampf in order to make his own case for destroying federalism and states' rights in Germany.)" DiLorenzo also notes that students were taught to salute the flag with an upright arm, similar to the Nazi salute. The practice was discontinued around 1950, when it was finally considered to be "in bad taste".

The Pledge of Allegiance, therefore, is clearly a socialist, if not fascist, document that pledges one to obey The State rather than God or one's conscience. Francis Bellamy's dream of a Superstate that enforces, by violence, its propaganda upon its students, the propaganda of a socialist nightmare and a statist ideology, came true. Ironically, the Pledge has become controversial today for all the wrong reasons, with Christian conservatives bent upon establishing the legitimacy of the words, "under God" (which were not in the original pledge at all, but added by Congress in 1954). But, as DiLorenzo points out, "The Pledge itself is an oath of allegiance to the central state, and the "under God" language only serves to deify the state."

Is there any document ever written so antithetical to the beliefs our Founders? Did George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, or Ben Franklin pledge their loyalty to a socialist (Marxist) Megastate? Did they indend to deify America?

I say let no oath of allegiance to any state deceive us any longer. Let us also remember that we are not, no matter the Yankee propaganda to the contrary, "one nation, indivisible." We are, in fact, a Republic, and that Republic has always, even since the 1600s, been divided. The Northern people and the Southern people have always been two separate cultures, two separate peoples. The fact that the Yankee Empire brutally forced the Southern people into its "Union" is irrelevant. Let them keep their "Union" while we keep our faith, for Southrons are aleady a people under God, and our God needs no pledge but our faith.