Mount Rushmore ~ A Reckoning
DISPATCHES
Mount Rushmore ~ A Reckoning
28 September 2026
Part I
Our minds are understandably concentrated upon the approach of the midterms. Everything rests upon their outcome. If the Republicans are not defeated, then the world is going to enter into a very, very dark place.
Some argue that we are already in that place, but we have seen nothing yet if the 47th is not defeated.
Mount Rushmore has always inspired me. Whenever I see it in books or on screen over six decades, I am filled with awe. How on earth was this accomplished?
Reading the October 2026 issue of the BBC History Extra magazine, a short and revelatory article by the magazine’s content producer, Danny Bird provides me with an overview.
The image in the magazine naturally catches my eye.
My first surprise is to find that the project did not begin until 1927 (the year my father was born).
My second surprise is to find that it was not completed until 31 October 1941.
Gracious! America was still not in the Second World War although assisting indirectly. This would change overnight on 7/8 December 1941.
My father’s brother (after whom I’m named) was undergoing pilot training at Craig Field Alabama in October 1941 and when I look at the family Archive, it is clear from the correspondence that we were very proud that Ken was learning to fly in the USA. Moreover, that he had travelled by troopship to Toronto, hence his RAF Logbook actually being RCAF - Royal Canadian Air Force. Our countries had already been at war for two years and in Great Britain alone roughly 43,000 people (records tend to hover “upwards of 40,000 civilian population” have been killed in the blitz by 31 December 1941.
Part II
My own adopted city, Liverpool, has been almost flattened between 1–8 May 1941 and when I first saw the photographs of the City Centre after those eight nights I remember sitting silently in the museum at Albert Dock and not quite grasping what had happened. The devastation had not been released immediately to the general public for fear of lowering morale. Liverpudlians were not to be outwitted and promptly managed to publish a small booklet that is still highly popular 85 years later.
All of us today have no reason to misunderstand this as we are active witnesses to the War in Ukraine, the Israel Gaza War and the Iran War, not to mention the equally devastating irregular wars that threaten to become major regional wars in their own right.
When I moved to Liverpool in 2003 to practise law for three months as a Locum attachment, I had no idea that I would not leave the city until June 2017 having retired in 2010, finally accepting that it was right and proper as I approached old age to return to my home county of Gloucestershire and therefore close to the family in that county and in Hampshire and Essex and even Northumbria far to the north. Hence my website often using the phrase From City Boy and Back to Shire Lad.
Part III
But returning to Mount Rushmore I’m reminded of the potential greatness of the American people.
Things have gone very wrong over the last 11 years and if the 47th lives long enough to complete his term, his period of influence will be equal to that of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. I do not just in that comparison. There are plenty of independent American journalists that openly speak of the fascist regime that Americans are now labouring under.
I do not mince my words.
Many people are dead because the American people failed to heed the warning of the 45th presidency. The man becomes a convicted felon during the 46th presidency and it is a very reasonable comment to voice – that when the world, the free world, began to suspect that the American people - God only knows how and why - would elect a convicted felon to a second term, then the free world looked on with absolute disbelief, and moreover, the lights in the world’s capitals would have burned long into the night.
A collective injunction:
we cannot allow this to happen again. The man is a wrecking-ball
Brought to the lowest common denominator..
How could a nation be hoodwinked into believing that a TV reality host and presenter of late 20th century soap challenge ‘The Apprentice’ in any way be the real thing? How could people see in that TV reality presenter the dignity and intelligence of the office of the President of the USA? Or two paraphrase the 47th, ‘the dignity and intelligence of the office of the president of the United States of America America held through 46 presidential terms since president George Washington?’ And moreover, to be hoodwinked into believing that this apprentice is the greatest of them all?
Greater than the four presidents who appear on Mount Rushmore? Greater than president F D Roosevelt? Greater than president John F. Kennedy?
Part IV
The Midterms for the American people place a responsibility upon their shoulders greater than any responsibility that they have borne in their 250 year history of independence. It is a very short history when compared with all of the other civilisations that run into many millennia.
God help us all if they, yet again, get it wrong.
Part V
In the Nine-Eleven dispatch published last week, old America has gone.
Present America will shortly depart and will only be known as that seismic blip on the timeline of history.
The America of tomorrow will take a generation to rebuild. It will also take a generation to earn afresh the respect and cooperation of the free world. Never again, must America forced upon itself the title. ‘leader of the free world.’ those days have gone. It is clear that the emerging middle powers will simply not countenance that.
I am 73 and therefore grew up in the long shadow of the Second World War.
As I have mentioned in previous dispatches, my family did only what millions of other families did in both world wars – serving with great honour, losing four in the First World War and two in the Second World War – in other words four great uncles and two uncles to my sisters and me.
I mention this only to remind myself of what is at stake and that my family is the tiniest representative of what millions of families worldwide did in two world wars. I am mindful of the 67,000 American airmen of the mighty eighth that flew on operations from the United Kingdom paid the ultimate sacrifice. I also think of the other Services.
I then recall the 58,220 American Service personnel and 523 Australian personnel killed in the Vietnam war. There is also the earlier Korean war. There is the Cold War and then all the wars that America and her allies have fought in the Middle East, serving together, many dying together, and the remainder somehow surviving and returning home.
Mount Rushmore, as I look at President George Washington, President Thomas Jefferson, President Theodore Roosevelt and President Abraham Lincoln – all my boyhood heroes – I pondered upon fiction:
“ ‘if they could see the collective antics of the 45th and 47th presidency what on earth would be their verdict not only upon the current president, but more importantly upon the State of the Union otherwise known as the Greater American People?
What would be said by the likes of F.D. Roosevelt, of Dwight Eisenhower, of J.F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan at the far distant stance between America and her former allies?’ ”
Allies that have been loyal but pushed beyond limit by a man who was never qualified to hold office, let alone the highest office of the land – as President of the United States of America?
That is an indictment and if my American friends find this discomforting to read, then so be it.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
I hear loud and clear the argument that all the member states of NATO must pay their way and not rely upon the USA. That is now being resolved, and I respectfully remind all of my American friends – and there are very many when I look at the analytics on my website not to mention all of my American friends that I know personally both in the states and around the world - it is wrong to say that countries have been milking America. It is wrong to say that Canada has no armed forces.
Let us therefore return to Mount Rushmore. What an achievement! The drills fell silent in South Dakota’s Black Hills, Danny Bird writes and what must everyone have fought when they gazed upon the four enormous faces “gazing down upon them out across the autumn blaze of golden Aspen?”
I learn that the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum died just seven months before completion and that his son Lincoln was, thankfully, able to oversee the project to completion. I learn that the project was then halted for good for two reasons:
◦ lack of funds to continue
◦ and awareness that the United States were edging towards entry into the Second World War
I learn that the whole project was the brainchild of the state historian for South Dakota Doane Robinson, whose vision was for a giant mountain carving that would draw visitors to that part of the USA.
Gutzon Borglum, however, transformed Robinson‘s vision into the incredibly grand accomplishment we all know today.
Part VI
However, history always brings us up short with facts that we often do not want to acknowledge even though we might be aware of them deep down. Certainly, for me, this is the case with regard to the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth – not to be confused with the Commonwealth of Nations[i].
Such an accomplishment arrives through the sacrifices of others, and to their detriment. I speak of the indigenous American Peoples. None of us can throw stones.
This is the case with every political and geopolitical organisation throughout the history of humankind. Mount Rushmore, known to the indigenous Lakota as the Six Grandfathers, stands in the Black Hills – land that had been guaranteed to the Sioux Nation under the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868). Unfortunately, gold prospecting discovered in the decade following meant that the treaty was reneged upon. To many indigenous Americans, the original owners of the land, Mount Rushmore is a sacred landscape. One can, therefore, understand that not everyone looks upon Mount Rushmore with the same viewpoint. As Danny Bird points out, ‘carving the faces of four US presidents into a sacred landscape was a grievous insult.’
No. I am not throwing stones here. I am British and I am well aware of our own history both geopolitically and within the British and Irish Isles. Our history does not make good reading at times. Humankind uniquely possesses a nature that is at complete variance with Nature and with the Animal Kingdom, on land, in the air, on sea and in the deepest ocean depths. Even we – notwithstanding counter argument by of every religion and their sacred text – are not a superior species to all other species, but merely the evolutionary development within Nature.
It must be stated here that the US government did attempt to award financial compensation to the Sioux Nation, but that this was rejected, the people insisting that "the Black Hills are not for sale". The matter remains unresolved almost a century later and as Danny Bird reminds us, "Mount Rushmore remains not simply a monument to US history, but also a reminder of an unresolved legacy carved into the very landscape itself".
The actual construction of the project is a feat of monumental proportion in itself. I learn that over the years, over 400 workers were safely suspended from cables who then drilled, blasted and chiselled away around 450,000 tons of granite, using dynamite for around 90% of the excavation. Amazingly, no one died.
Part VII
Only the American electorate can resolve the situation that the United States of America currently finds itself embedded and successfully extricate itself from this quicksand. I have every faith and confidence that the American people will succeed.
Many will have seen a Netflix film entitled Civil War. It is not a film to be watched with a box of popcorn. I watched it with great reluctance, and distaste, when it first came out. I did not like it and I took the view that this was not the America, nor the American people that I know. Almost a year later, I'm writing from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the antics of a mafia family that has managed to somehow gain occupancy of the White House and plunged America into major wars, threatened Allies, and deported more than 50,000 undocumented people from places like Seattle Airport, I begin to wonder what would happen if the People made the wrong decision, or more likely, the ballot was interfered with.
With the deportations I have naïvely assumed that people were being transported by airliners. Hence an element of dignity. But having studied extensively the horrors of The Holocaust and also The Third Reich 1933-1945 I should have known better. I was rudely awakened out of my slumber by THIS IS FASCISM A WAKE-UP CALL by Rosan Smits in the Introduction [ii]
Early in February 2025, a video appeared on X. A US immigration officer can be seen patting down someone before deportation. In the background, Seattle Airport, a plane readying for departure, its engines idling.
Then, the rattle of metal: a blue plastic crate filled with cuffs on chains. Someone is laying them out in lines on the tarmac – one set per person. People are being cuffed tightly, hands and feet. The camera shows no faces, only bodies and irons. The video ends with a shackle detainee struggling up the steel aircraft stairs, their chains clanking against the metal steps.
The title of the post: ‘ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 📢. That abbreviation is a wry reference to the genre of online videos intended to induce a safe, soothing feeling through certain sounds – think of whispers, the rhythmic tapping of raindrops or rustling of leaves in the wind. In this case, the sounds of heavily chained people being deported.
The source of the post: the White House. [iii]
The BBC documentary series by Professor David Olosuga OBE is currently airing. It concentrates upon the identity of the Slave Traders in Britain. It makes for grim viewing, but the most shocking - we’ve all seen them - are the drawings of how enslaved peoples were transported to America. Their identities had been removed. They were ‘property’. And many a christian took comfort that they were doing the Lord’s work, for did he not say that some nations are born to rule, while others are born into slavery and to remain slaves? (Exodus 21: 2-11; 20-21 and Leviticus 25 44-46).
There are people in my own country who yearn for this approach to immigration. In Germany, likewise. In Germany they did this in 1933 and by the beginning of the Second World War things were being done that even today defy description. We have to stand strong. Today the term oligarch is rife. We have oligrachs here in Britain, not just Russia and America.
What I find so shocking is that educated people in the middle of educated and enjoyable converstion will then suddenly remark about coloured, brown, black. What on earth are we playing at?
Will you, in America, succeed in righting the boat before she capsizes? I believe you will.
But your sails are already lying on the surface. Don’t, accidentally, go under!
In this country a former right-wing home secretary, Suella Braverman, demanded that our cherished RNLI [v] whose motto is saving lives at sea caused uproar this month by demanding that RNLI crews cease being ‘a taxi service’ to illegal boat crossings on the English Channel. The result? Complaints by many, other lifelong supporters left messages that they had no option but to cancel their monthly donations; but more worryingly was the instance of verbal and even some physical abuse upon our RNLI crews, all of whom are volunteers and save hundreds of lives throughout our Islands every year. Yet Ms Braverman is not alone.
We have, all of us, lost our way… we are an embarrassment internationally to the Greatest Generation.
Part VIII
As I say, I still have great faith in the American people, and I believe that if they are able to reverse the situation that afflicts their nation, this will have a very positive effect upon all nations who enjoy freedom and democracy but find themselves similarly faced with the extreme right.
In times such as these, I still firmly hold to that expression:
“when the vociferous minority are presumed to be the silent majority, and the silent majority presume that they are the vociferous minority.”
This was certainly the case in 1933. Let not that mistake be made again.
END
28 September 2026
All Rights Reserved
Gloucestershire and Liverpool
© 2026 Kenneth thomas Webb
[i] The former British Empire came to an end in 1948 by a conscious and deliberate act of the British government. The Empire had been referred to as the Commonwealth. In Churchill’s wartime speeches he often referred to ‘the British Empire and it’s Commonwealth’, and on other occasions ‘the British Commonwealth and it’s empire’. In history, empires crumbles violently. Occasionally, one might mercifully just fade away. Something curious happened in 1948. The empire morphed into what was known for a short time as the British Commonwealth and comprising eight nations, notably Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Yet, this too, came with shocking violence in different countries as, free of the colonial yoke they turned upon each other. There were scores to be settled. India, the former Raj and jewel in the crown was was such example. Originally, Canada, Australia and New Zealand had been dominions, independent but within the orbit of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. These nations obtained their full independence but retained the monarch as their head of state.
Who would have imagined in 1948, especially in the White House, whose aim had been to bring down the British Empire, and understandably so, as expressed by president FD Roosevelt a decade or more earlier, that in 2026 the Empire would have ‘morphed’ into what we now know as the completely independent Commonwealth of Nations and with its elected head of state as the monarch of the United Kingdom, who is also the King of Canada, the King of Australia and the King of New Zealand. The Commonwealth of Nations was unanimous in retaining Queen Elizabeth II as their head of state for the duration of her lifetime. But a very important principle was established. This was not to be hereditary. Therefore, it would not pass automatically to King Charles III. The Commonwealth of Nations elected the present as its head of state, but this does not mean that the future King William IV will be its head of state. There are countless people within the Commonwealth to whom we might look in the future as the collective and inspiring head of state.
People of the calibre and international standing of the late President Nelson Mandela.
The Commonwealth in 1948 comprised eight nations; in 2026 it comprises 56 nations.
Nations can freely leave and freely join. Many deride the institution and completely failed to understand the significance of this International Body that acts collectively and with a voice that is rather different to that emanating out of the White House for the past 78 years since 1948. This situation is, in the vernacular, ‘a one-off’.
The United Kingdom has achieved that which is beyond the capability of the USA as it is presently governed, and likewise with Russia and China.
[ii] first published in 2025 by Atlantic Books Limited in Great Britain, the original publication in the Netherlands in 2025 as Dit ist fascisme by De Correspondent.
[iii] The White House [@WhiteHouse], ‘ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight https://t.co/O6L1Yt9b4’, X (formerly Twitter), 18 February 2025, https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1891922058415603980.
[iv] Mount Rushmore under construction and by courtesy of HistoryExtra magazine, page 7 in an article by Danny Bird, Content Producer.
[v} Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
