When people perceive that nefarious forces are at work to subvert their own liberties and freedoms, they naturally want to stop those forces. When those forces are governmental, resistance to them becomes of paramount concern. Such was the case with the recent rise of the Tea Party Movement in America and the subsequent suppression of their citizen rights by the Obama Administration’s IRS.
After being targeted by the IRS, maligned in the mainstream press, and by liberal-leftists, Tea Party groups began to drop out of the public eye. Many observers thought they had dissolved into oblivion. But, they did not. They simply revamped their operations, and began working behind the scenes, so to speak. And, with the recent 2016 elections, you could say for the most part, they won — and they won big time!
The Tea Party is an anti-establishment movement, and Donald Trump certainly fits that description. The Tea Party was born out of the frustrations of citizens who believed that government was taking advantage of its citizenry and granting extravagant favors to a chosen few.
The movement took its name from America’s original Boston Tea Party rebellion, which was a reaction to England’s Tea Act of 1772. The Tea Act gave corporate tea sellers a drawback or “tax kickbacks” on tea sent to America. In 1773, a group of Bostonians disguised as Indians led by Samuel Adams boarded the ships carrying tea and tossed the tea overboard into the harbor. The Boston Tea Party rebellion immediately aroused the imaginations of colonists throughout the American colonies and the incident was immediately repeated in several seaport towns along the coast.
England responded with the Intolerable Acts (or Coercive Acts) and the Quebec Act, in 1774. These Acts, along with the previous 1765 Stamp Act, were the final straw for the colonists. The result, in 1775 was that the American colonies united in calling for a ‘Continental Congress’ which would begin to prepare American colonists for war against England. This began the American colonist’s official resistance by force against the British Crown. The colonial resistance began as a means to settle a list of grievances colonists had against England’s policies, but soon became a united call for independence.
In 1776, the Americans made their intentions known for complete independence from England with the ‘Declaration of Independence.’ This officially began the war for American independence — The Revolutionary War — no longer a resistance to fight for grievances, but a war to fight for complete independence from England. The English Crown saw the American uprising as a ‘Puritan’ led resistance and referred to the war for independence as the “Puritan Revolution.” England targeted Puritan churches for destruction during the war and for the most part, destroyed them. Yet, the united spirit of all the American colonies carried on and prevailed. The rest, as they say is history.
More than 150 years later, in Germany, during Adolph Hitler’s reign, informal small-group gatherings of independent resistance groups were formed, called ‘Tea Circles.’ The Tea Circles of Nazi Germany were also known by other individual names such as: the Solf Circle, Solf Tea Party or the ‘Tea Party.’ Many members were German dissidents or resistors to the Nazi regime.
Johanna or “Hannah” Solf, invited a small-group (‘circle’) of like-minded anti-Nazi individuals, to her salon in Berlin. The Solf Tea Circle or Solf-Kreis was soon formed and began to work closely with other like-minded ‘tea circle’ resistance groups, such as the Kreisau Circle, also known as, Kreisauer Kreis.
Members of the Solf Tea Circle included; career officers from the Foreign Office, industrialists, writers, Jesuit priests, Lutheran pastors, trade-union leaders, landowners, and others. Most members were conservatives, although Johanna Solf was herself a moderate. A few other members were monarchists, some liberals and some were well known luminaries.
The Tea Circle’s main focus was to develop and propose a peacetime government for a new Germany after the war. The underground group decided to plan a society based on Christian values. Most members desired to see the regeneration of Germany, based on Christian principles, with the restoration of basic freedoms. They envisioned a federal state consisting of a weak central-government based on small self-governing communities. (Contrarily, Hitler’s aim was to return Germany to its pagan, pre-Christian past). The Tea Circles maintained contact with other resistance groups and informed European allies (mostly Britain) of the political conditions within the Nazi regime. Some members harbored other resistors in their homes.
A few members of the Solf-Circle group also decided to work confidentially towards actively pursuing a political coup and the assassination of Adolph Hitler. They put together a unit of key individuals to carry out their mission. Their mission was secretly connected to Hitler’s own Operation Walkure (Operation Valkyrie) and was set-up as a double-cross, designed to kill Hitler and take over the military. After the failed coup and assassination attempt, several members of the Tea Circle were found-out and executed. The group fell apart after the arrest of Helmuth James Graf von Moltke on January 19, 1944. Although the Tea Circle movement in Germany was overcome and ended by the fascist Nazi regime; the spirit and work of the ‘Tea Circle’ movement helped in the larger resistance to Nazism, and Hitler’s Nazism was ultimately defeated.
Today’s American Tea Party movement is a grass roots public policy resistance movement operating outside the bounds of official political party affiliation. The movement is composed of a loose affiliation of national and local groups that determine their own platforms and agendas without central leadership. The Tea Party leans towards a Republican-Libertarian-populist ideology, but is not a national political party.
The movement began in August of 2008 with the website ChicagoTeaParty.com. It was registered and launched by Zack Christianson after a CNBC news commentary about the government-plan to refinance defaulted home mortgages. Then, in January 2009, Trevor Leach, president of Young American’s for Liberty organized a “Tea Party” to protest the new obesity taxes in New York. Another key Tea Party resistance was the protest to the bailout of the banks and the auto-industry, by both, the Bush and Obama Administrations.
Journalist Kate Zemike of the New York Times says Tea Party leaders also credit Seattle blogger and conservative activist Keli Carender with organizing the first Tea-Party event called a ‘Porkulus Protest,’ in February 2009. Carender’s first event drew about 120 people, her second event drew twice as many people. The formation of individual Tea Party groups quickly became national news and soon Tea Party groups began springing-up all over the country.
The movement generally focuses on government reform and attempts to inform and influence politicians of their policy positions. Tea Party influence in recent elections has been significant to candidates and in representing the groups policy ideas. Not-too-shabby for a grass roots organization that liberal media cronies and Democrat Party operatives relentlessly malign as extremist, out of the mainstream, or irrelevant. And that former President Barak Obama, through government bureaucrats, tried to suppress and silence. Fortunately, Obama and his fascist bureaucrats were eventually exposed.
May the American patriotic spirit of groups like the Tea Party — of resisting oppressive and destructive government policies — always thrive and survive in American political culture.
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This is a brief edited version from: https://gospelbbq.wordpress.com/2013/12/31/tea-circles-tea-parties-and-government-resistance/
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