America’s conservative, patriotic warriors, serving a leftist, globalist ideology

The discussion began May 18 in the entry, “In Afghanistan, sacrificing our men for those who hate us.” The questions addressed so far include: Is there something about the warrior ethos and high morale of our fighting men that will lead us keep our forces in Afghanistan indefinitely, no matter how impossible and doomed the overall mission? Does the dedication of our professional warriors make it possible for the U.S. to maintain permanent war for “global democracy? Would universal military conscription instead of an all-volunteer military be better? What can be done about the leftist ideology that now controls the military? Should white Christian men, the backbone of the military, “go on strike” and stop enlisting?

The discussion continues here.

Van Wijk writes:

Pentheus wrote:

These men do not want to be “out of harm’s way” in the way she means it. They want to be inches out of harm’s way, not thousands of miles.

I felt exactly the same way as a private soldier in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The prospect of going to war was the only reason I enlisted.

You wrote: “The problem is, how are we supposed to think about our military when it has been taken over by an insane ideology, an ideology which, as the title of this entry says, tells our fighting men to die for people who hate them?”

You’re coming at the problem from the wrong angle. You should accept the fact that it is not “our” military; it’s “their” military, the federal military, the belligerent arm of a government that wishes us destroyed. For this reason, the newest diversity schemes which threaten the very manliness described above are not unwelcome.

Make sure each able-bodied man has a good rifle and ammunition and is willing to defend his home and borders, and we barely have need for a professional military at all.

Van Wijk continues:

Try as I might, I cannot think of a conflict America has taken part in after the War of 1812 (which would have to be an absolute existential necessity) that would justify instating a draft. Even then, since American soil had been invaded, the militia could have been immediately mustered (and this is indeed what happened). I’m with General Butler. Let’s defend our homes and the Bill of rights. I honestly can’t imagine a foreign war which would directly threaten either of those. The draft is simply state-sponsored kidnapping.

I think we should have a standing army. Let it be an army of volunteers, let it be all male, and let it never consist of more than 250,000 men. Its mission should be to do nothing more than hold the line until the militia can be mustered, and the very rare surgical strike in the case of, say, a jihadist organization gaining access to an intercontinental ballistic missile. I believe that in Federalist No. 46 James Madison said that if a standing army is indeed necessary, the militia should always outnumber it at least two to one. Since the arms of the average militiaman were not that different from the arms of a soldier in Madison’s day, it follows that that modern militia should be expected to own the same equipment that the modern army has.

Of course, these are recommendations for the successor republic. Your criticism [in a private exchange] that I don’t want the U.S. military to exist is correct, since I view that military as a threat to our society.

Van Wijk continues:

You wrote:

The answer seems to be that nothing can be done about that problem, short of overturning the left-wing ideology that currently rules America

True as far as it goes. The military would seem to be among the Big Ticket Items that can only be resolved with the overthrow of the entire liberal apparatus.

You wrote:

One way this could start happening, as suggested by Diana West, is that, given the homosexualization of the military that is now in progress, Christian men, the backbone of the military, stop enlisting.

But that idea only brings us back to another problem discussed here, which is that the military, notwithstanding the leftist, PC ideology that governs it, remains extremely attractive to many young men wanting to live the warrior life, a warrior life made even more appealing to them by the professional nature of the military. Thus the very people who need to refuse to serve in the military, because of its PC-ized nature, are the ones most drawn to it, because of the warrior culture that also still exists within it, alongside the PC.

I recall making the same point. Also, the only part of the military currently immune from PC are the combat arms, which are something like 80 percent Caucasian and male. With the repeal of DADT, the combat arms will no longer be immune. The homosexualization of the combat arms may finally break the warrior ethos of the military and make it an unattractive proposition for young white men. When this happens, the militia should be waiting with open arms.

Van Wijk continues:

Mark Jaws wrote: “Finally, at the top of the heap are the elite units, and I would include many—if not most—of the airborne units of the 82nd Airborne Division.”

This is funny. A friend of mine was a member of the 82nd in the late ’90s. He said it was so full of blacks that among white soldiers it was referred to as “All African” rather than “All American.”

You wrote:

But do not these same elite units operate under suicidal rules of engagement and cooperate with Afghan “allies” who are really their enemies, and all the rest of it?

Mr. Jaws would do well to remember the case of Sgt. Evan Vela, who executed an Iraqi who would have certainly given away his team’s position and has been languishing in prison ever since. You wrote about it at VFR in 2008 in an entry called “Our perverted Iraq policy”:

As Diana West writes, last year, early in the surge, an elite U.S. Army sniper squad was hiding out in insurgent-controlled territory south of Baghdad when it captured an al Qaeda sympathizer. The man was obviously going to inform al Qaeda about the squad’s whereabouts if it released him. Facing a desperate choice, the squad’s commander ordered Sgt. Evan Vela to kill the man, and he did so, and the squad ultimately returned safely to base. Vela was then tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to ten years in prison, in a trial that took place not in the U.S. but in Iraq after his division had returned home.

Mr. Jaws may also want to brush up on Operation Red Wings, in which an entire squad of SEALs was destroyed when its commander, Lieutenant Michael Murphy, refused to execute a goatherd who knew the squad’s position. Murphy was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. These men now reside in the actual Valhalla.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that elite units are less affected by PC than regular units. If the former are ordered by their leftist masters (some of whom will be in uniform) to open fire on a crowd of Americans, will they refuse the order? Personally, I’d rather not find out. Barring outright mutiny, soldiers will not be changing the culture of the military; they’ll be doing what they’re told, as soldiers always have. Let the SEALs be overrun with blacks, single mothers, and queers, and let us watch from the sidelines. Those who continue to advocate enlistment for young white men have their heads in the sand and are simply pushing tradition for the sake of tradition.

Ken Hechtman writes:

Be careful what you ask for. You might get it. The last few times soldiers questioned the big-picture politics that defined their mission, it didn’t end well. As you can imagine, the Army doesn’t encourage soldiers questioning big-picture politics. It doesn’t help them develop those skills. So when soldiers start to do that on their own in any kind of organized way, they’re easy pickings for the first ideologue to come along. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single effort along those lines that ended any place you’d approve of, and with one exception, I can’t think of any others that ended well by any sane standards.

Andy Stapp’s American Servicemen’s Union in the mid-1960s was a Socialist Workers Party front from day one. It never rose above Trotskyite sloganeering and as a result never had much growth or influence.

The War Resisters’ campaign in Canada in the last decade was much the same. It was an International Socialist Organization front from day one. It was painful to watch. They’d bring in these Iraq War deserters and the first time they’d speak they’d sound like themselves and they were human and authentic and powerful. And then you’d hear the same kid speak six months later and he’d sound exactly like every other Trotskyite speaker you’d ever heard.

Vietnam Veterans Against the War started off strong in the early 1970s but eventually degenerated into Maoist sloganeering.

Marines for a Democratic Military in the late 1960s started off on the Catch-22 premise that the enemy is whoever is trying to get you killed, regardless of whose uniform he’s wearing. They degenerated into heroin dealing and contract murder. They famously offered a $50,000 bounty on William Westmoreland. It was never collected.

The Special Forces Underground (later The Resisters) got started by a group of Delta Force officers right after Waco. Their starting premise was eminently simple and sensible. It was “This isn’t what we signed up for. And we’re not going to do it again. Not to fellow Americans who to our minds didn’t do anything wrong.” In the first years they were righteous as hell. They got everyone in the spec ops community talking what they would and wouldn’t do on American soil. That was well worth doing whatever came next. But they got hijacked by ideologues like all the others. By 2001 they’d degenerated into Randian sloganeering.

The only exception I can think of is the GI coffeehouse movement in the late 1960s. That worked well. But the feds are on to that tactic now. Both military and civilian law got changed to make running a coffeehouse in a basetown a lot harder than it used to be.

True story about the Resisters:

Ten or twelve years ago I met a woman at a party. She was a polygraph tech for the FBI. I don’t go looking for these James Bond people. I really don’t. They find me. She told me that part of her job was to go to Fort Bragg twice a year and question all the various commandos about the Resisters. This was a big deal back then. The feds were making serious efforts to root them out. But she was sympathetic to their aims, she said a lot of people in the “alphabet soup agencies” were, and she covered for them as best she could.

May 22

Mark Jaws writes:

Last thing I want to do is to get into a nitpicking contest with Mr. Van Wijk, but as anyone who has examined trends ought to know, exceptions abound to every rule. For example, while men are generally taller than women, I can go on the streets of any city and find lots of tall women and an equal amount of short men.

Anyone who has been in the military knows there is an undeniable color gradient from combat service support to the elite units. And as far as the “All-African Division” goes, I wonder if Mr. Wijk ever heard of the 82nd DISCOM, (Division Support Command). That is where the combat service support units of the 82nd reside and combat service support in any division is going to be very black. Notice, in my post about combat units, I said MOST UNITS of the 82nd.

I had heard the story about the SEAL Team, but I don’t know how it pertains to the point I am making. The Rangers and SF folks I know are very conservative, and with the exception of senior commanders (very few make high rank without having to buy into PC somehow, some way) they are not at all tinged by PC. Just because one SEAL commander unwisely decided to let one particular goatherder live, does not a trend make.

Like many VFR readers, I ingest data and information, examine trends, and look at the future. If the country splits apart in the not so distant future, or Blue State America tries to impose a dictatorship, I want my side to have hundreds of thousands—or, better, millions—of conservative men who have military experience. When one enlists in the military, one does not have to sell one’s soul to the PC Devil.

Paul Nachman writes:

This AP report says troop morale in Afghanistan plummets. The headline isn’t entirely consistent with the article’s content, since the latter has some suggestions that morale is actually at decent levels.

I’m sending it because of your recent entry on the spirit of our fighters.

May 25

The Virginian writes:

I am new to this website, having been recently invited to check it out, and it seems I have stumbled upon a particularly appropriate discussion for me to join.

A common thread here is the generally blanched appearance of our combat arms formations and the reasons for it. Based on a twenty-year career as an enlisted man (retiring as a senior NCO), I believe it’s important to look at WHY people join the Army in the first place. Stereotypically speaking, members of minority communities join the Army to learn a skill or trade to ply once their time of service is up. This isn’t meant to be judgmental—it doesn’t make their service any less noble—but it is relevant when looking at the demographic makeup of various branches within the Army. Support branches like signal, admin and transportation are overwhelmingly manned by minority members, which is why the 82d’s Division Support Command has been referred to as the “All Africans.” More offensively, the 35th Signal Brigade, also at Bragg, has been called the 35th Nignal Brigade because of its demographics. This is not to say white people don’t join for the same reason, as surely many do, but there is a much larger component that joins out of either a sense of duty or adventure. Others are a combination of both. I joined for the college money, but once in the Army I discovered I enjoyed soldiering and stuck around for the long haul. There are many reasons for my staying until retirement, but a very large component of it was finding a home in the special operations forces (SOF) community. SOF is very much a place where men can still be men and where PC has had limited influence.

I think there is some confusion about what constitutes political correctness within combat units and engagements. Two examples cited here as being PC are nothing of the sort, in fact. First off, the word “execute” is off the mark. An execution is the implementation of capital punishment, i.e. the lawful killing of a criminal after being found guilty of a crime for which death is the approved sentence; soldiers on the battlefield don’t execute anyone. In any case, both examples cited by Mr. Van Wijk as being emblematic of PC are fallacious. Not shooting an unarmed civilian who has discovered a unit’s hide site isn’t political correctness, it’s following the Law of Land Warfare. It’s what separates us from our enemies. It reminds me of a well-known vignette from DESERT STORM when a ODA 525 was performing a special reconnaissance mission in Iraq and was compromised by some children who ran back to tell their parents what they’d discovered. There was a very brief discussion about what to do, but in the end they decided to take what was coming, which ended up being a firefight. They could have killed the children, as Vela did to the man who’d discovered his team, but we don’t do that. Lt. Murphy knows this, too, and clearly his honor and obligation to follow the law of war were more important to him than his life. THAT is what makes such men special.

Lastly, the idea of “the homosexualization of the military” is much overwrought. There already are gay people serving in the military and always have. I’ve served in units with soldiers everybody knew was gay but nobody cared because they were good at their jobs. There are gay Special Forces soldiers and the guys on the team don’t care. It certainly hasn’t lead to a degradation of the team’s capabilities or a weakening of the warrior ethos. The fact is that a gay guy goes to SF for the same reasons a straight guy does—to jump out of airplanes, run around the woods, blow stuff up and shoot bad guys in the face. It isn’t as if all of a sudden a bunch of stereotypically effeminate homosexuals are going to turn out for SF selection when the repeal of DADT goes into effect.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 21, 2011 11:22 AM | Send