Yesterday I burned two hours and 2,000 words on a case-by-case defense of America’s greatest warrior, Nathan Bedford Forest, whose bones have been exhumed to remove his evil taint. In all 7 major charges against him, lies, falsehoods and misconception reign. I posted that behind a pay wall so I’d take limited heat.
But why, really, must the general of this nation who had more horses shot out from under him, slew more men with his hand, who was shot multiple times, and who won a larger percentage of against the odds battles than any other American in history, why must he be targeted for grave site desecration?
Because he was literally our best warrior—the best, with no man coming in a close second, not even Crazy Horse, Bobby Lee, Blue Jacket, Audie Murphy, Geronimo, Sargent York. These men in the aggregate failed to fight as many battles, win as many battles, and only Murphy and York killed as many men, but they did it at a distance with machines, not hand-to-hand and in your face.
When faith and heroism die—as in The House of Submission to God, whose adherents have so little faith that they must erase records of extinct life ways in Iraq and Syria and of a passive religion in Buddhism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, one sees an extreme jealousy of valor. Systems abhor the hero, are all in their makeup anti-heroic. There is no way that a society who gives a medal to a GI who got hit by a landmine making a beer run in Nam, who has named people heroes and warriors just for being passively wounded while servicing their war machines, which has assigned the name of hero to bully PIGS and dancing nurses—no such sissy society can abide the image of the unvarnished warrior.
The true great man is great whether he is good or evil. But in our end time, society cannot abide the purity of greatness, of simply being the best fighter, most ruthless captain or most cunning general, let alone all three. Our sissy hearts only manage to swallow greatness if it is washed in a patina of simpering lies.
Last night I sat at the dining room table with my Land Lady, as she drank her muscadine wine from a shot glass and said a prayer to her ancestors, and made the mistake of inviting my blessing as I hefted a glass of rum and said, “Death to the faɡɡots.”
This is why Genghis Khan, a man who Forest would have served as a Tumen leader, was buried in secrecy, with no grave marker, no prideful boast, because he knew as great men do, that the meek do not inherit the earth, they desecrate the dead, while the world slips through their undeserving fingers and their savage pets and public servants turn on them and serve their just deserts at the very table of their unalliable fears that is Life.
The fear of the dead is rooted in the fear of the hero, and therefore the fear of the best man, a person of reality which castes an awful shadow across the pal that is the delusion of Modernity inhabited by shivering creatures of fantasy, most affrighted by the warriors born in reality.
Kudos kudos kudos and a dram of ale!
They call everyone heroes now and everyone whose flight path goes over the corner of a country in which we play at sissy war, gets combat pay. REMFs get included in the unit citations thought the farthest they've gone from their desks is the latrine. At least in these sissy wars the REMF officers can go to the latrine without fear there's not a grenade wired to the toilet seat. In Nam there were over 900 fraggings of of incompetent officers, not to mention half a million desertions. Everyone is a hero but validating your theorem, Patton is painted black, tarnished forever, as is McArthur both vilified and championed......a hero in WW1 yes, WW2 the mojo was gone but neither would the Us allow him to be great. Schwartzkopf a hero.....lol. How much bravery to shoot and strafe a retreating, unarmed, army in the back for three days while they ran home to Baghdad.
Peasants, merchants & scholars almost universally love/hate the warrior. They need him to defend them against foreign conquerors abroad and bandits at home. The need him to mete out justice according to his warrior code, not how many shekels he gets (see America 2020).
But this dependency chafes and they come to loathe him for it. They envy and fear his strength and want to weigh him down with chains, an-ill-treated guard dog kept penned up until the orcs arrive.
The tragically cucked warrior ethos of today's "troops" is a great example. The modern warrior is expected to cuck to corrupt civilian authorities, women, children and hopelessly-conflicted Christian doctrines of just war, and even to observe suicidally-chivalric rules of engagement in enemy territory. Cops suffer from this as well.
Given these constraints, it's no surprise that today's warrior-bands are half-full of strivers, nutcases and petty tyrants rather than honorable men. You'd have to be naive, crazy, stupid or criminally-inclined to see these as attractive jobs.