(The Unfinished Symphony)
Clash of the Two Americas vol. 1: The Unfinished Symphony by Matthew Ehret
The Canadian Patriot Review is proud to announce that the first volume of "Clash of the Two Americas" is now available for purchase as a Paperback, Kindle and PDF under the theme "The Unfinished Symphony".

In order to whet your appetite, I include here the introduction of the new book which also features a summary of each of the 15 chapters.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REVIEWS FOR VOLUME ONE
An Introduction to The Unfinished Symphony (Clash of the Two Americas vol. 1)

The United States today sits upon a precipice and the dream of the Founding Fathers of a new age of reason for all humankind may soon be washed away by the sands of time as just another failed effort to bring humanity into alignment with the force of Natural Law.

Time and again, humanity has been brought closer to this dream of an age of moral reason and cooperation that would define the terms of international law, political-economy, the arts and even science policy. The topic was treated at length in Plato's Republic, Laws, and Gorgias, just as it was treated by the great Platonist of the Roman Republic, Cicero in his Commonwealth and Laws. It was treated thoroughly by the Platonic Christian St. Augustine of Hippo in his City of God and Free Choice of the Will and it was treated by Augustine's followers Alcuin (advisor to Charlemagne), Dante Alighieri, Nicholas of Cusa and countless great Renaissance scholars and statesmen.

The idea of a society founded upon the cultivation of the love of higher pleasures of the spirit rather than the feeding of the lower pleasures of the fleshly passions is thus a long standing one which has never been properly resolved and which has been sabotaged relentlessly by historic forces seeking to keep humanity enslaved to beliefs in sense perceptions as serfs chained to a cave wall believing that those shadows cast before their eyes were all the reality that exists.

It is our contention that without an appreciation for this dynamic interplay between sets of paradigms as a driving force in global grand strategy, then it were impossible to achieve any truthful understanding of what made such anomalies of history as the 15th century Italian Renaissance, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia or the 1776 American Revolution possible.

In this first volume of "The Clash of Two Americas", Rising Tide Foundation founders Cynthia Chung and Matthew Ehret break from the commonly practiced tradition of dissecting individual elements of history as myopic "events" to be carved out of a timeline, dissected and commented upon.

The authors instead propose treating US history as the effect of a significant continuous struggle between two opposing conceptions of humankind, law and mind which has shaped all seemingly discrete "events" throughout recorded history as one continuous function. Most importantly, following the historical methods outlined by the great Friedrich Schiller in his Universal History lectures, we will treat this study as not only an exploration of the past but as an exploration of the future, knowing as we do that 1) the past is shaped by ideas of competing futures that did or did not succeed and 2) our present circumstances are themselves both the consequences of the past and also the material which future historians will study when trying to make sense of how we either failed to break from our tragic trajectories or succeeded in avoiding a dark age.


Throughout this book, we will explore the origins of the USA as the world's first sovereign republic and the battles over ideas and policy from leading representatives of either school of thought during the 18th and 19th centuries. On the one hand we will explore the mind and strategies of paragons of the greatest renaissance traditions like Benjamin Franklin and his international network of collaborators that made the events of 1776-1783 possible. On the other hand we will contrast this with those heirs to the traditions of the Babylonian and Roman empires occupying positions of power within the corridors of the British Empire. With these two opposing forces established, we will be better able to see a context in which representatives influenced by either school of thought played a role for good or ill (sometimes doing both at different times) within the young United States from 1776 to 1901.

In chapter one, we will explore the international conspiracy of republican forces- largely organized by Benjamin Franklin stretching from France, Poland, Germany, and Russia, all the way to Morocco and India. This exercise will demonstrate that the United States is both more than many believe it to be and less than it was meant to become, remaining an unfinished symphony of sorts whose victory of 1783 was never truly consolidated, despite remaining whole throughout a Civil War.

From chapters two to four, we will review three case studies of failures of people and leaders to capture the "pregnant moment" of 1776, first with a review of the causes of French Canada's inability to join the signing of the declaration of independence as the 14th colony, followed by the failure of Benjamin Franklin's collaborators in France to keep the revolution of 1789 from sliding into a Jacobin bloodbath (chapter 3). In chapter four, we will see how an elderly Marquis Lafayette missed his second chance to undo the disastrous failure of the earlier French revolution after the Napoleonic Wars and Congress of Vienna traumatized Europe for nearly 40 years.

In chapter five, we will return to the case of the United States by testing the modern practice of Critical Race theory outlined in the 1619 Project that attempts to frame all US history as the direct effect of white supremacists seeking to dominate black slaves. This theory will be contrasted with an approach which both acknowledges the evils done throughout the pre and post revolutionary years while at the same time avoiding the polarizing trap of assuming all ideals professed by American statesmen were simply veils of hypocrisy wrapped in fraud.

In chapter six, the "American System of political economy" outlined by Benjamin Franklin and First Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton is explained. This exercise will help to better appreciate what was it that free trade-loving Anglo forces within both England and the USA sought to destroy and what was it that allowed the young republic to navigate through many storms during its first century of existence.

In chapter eight, the re-activation of Hamilton's system under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln is explored which itself provides an invaluable insight into how the Union was preserved and also the structure of the financial warfare conducted against the Union before, during and after the Civil War itself led by forces located in Wall Street, London, Louisiana and British Canada.

In chapter nine, Cynthia Chung showcases the life and mind of Frederick Douglass who rose from a situation of slavery, to becoming a leading voice of the abolitionists to rising yet higher still upon his discovery that the abolitionists themselves did not understand the nature of America's historical struggle. Douglass's defense of Lincoln, and efforts to bring cultural as well as political emancipation to both blacks and ignorant whites is explored.

In chapter ten, we delve deeply into the trifold structure of the 19th century deep state operations within the Americas that led in the fueling of fires of Civil War and also the assassination of Lincoln carried out by Confederate secret service operations based in Montreal Canada.

In chapters eleven and twelve, the truth of the Alaska purchase will be unveiled featuring the role of pro-American forces leading Russia under Czar Alexander II whose intervention into the US Civil War not only turned the tide in favor of Lincoln but also applied Lincoln's system of political economy (protectionism, productive credit, internal improvements) towards the industrial development of Russia. The story of the 1867 Alaska Purchase, 1867 British North America Act in Canada and the intention to connect the US Transcontinental railway with the planned Russian Trans Siberian Railway will thus be given new and fresh meaning from the acausal drivel popularly taught in schools today.

In chapter thirteen, we will continue this story into the case of 19th century Canada in order to evaluate how the British Columbian-US Annexation movement was sabotaged, why the vast expanses of private Hudson Bay properties occupying most of Canada were sold for pennies on the dollar to the Canadian government in 1869 and why the Anglo-Canadian version of the Trans Continental railway was built as a wedge to 1) keep Canada under Monarchical hold as a platform of anti-republican operations in the Americas and 2) keep a wedge lodged between a threatened US-Russian alliance for win-win cooperation then emerging as the basis for a new global system of sovereign nation states.

In chapter fourteen, the story of Lincoln's loyal bodyguard and first governor of Colorado, William Gilpin is told in full. Gilpin's role as a "prophet of progress" promoting the earliest campaign for a Trans Continental Railway starting in the 1840s, his efforts to create a US-China alliance to undo the corruption spreading in the USA, his role in preventing the South's opening of a Western front during the Civil War, his deployment of greenbacks modelled on Lincoln's example, and his 25 year post Civil War campaign to extend rail not only across the Bering Strait into Eurasia but also across Africa, South America, Asia and more.

Finally, chapter fifteen ends with the story of Britain's re-organization of their entire system of empire when faced with the crisis of a world of independent sovereign nation states threatening to undo the unipolar age of Hobbesian survival of the fittest that had characterized the empire as a singular new roman empire for nearly two centuries. This chapter introduces the role of new think tanks starting with Thomas Huxley's X Club in 1865, followed soon thereafter by the Fabian Society in 1878 and Rhodes-Milner Round Table Movement in 1902 which unveiled a new Grand Strategy to re-consolidate the empire's power during the 20th century and beyond.

This story will close the present volume and set the stage for volume two.
Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk, and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the 'Untold History of Canada' book series and in 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation . Consider helping this process by making a donation to the RTF or becoming a Patreon supporter to the Canadian Patriot Review