Lately I’ve been missing Fred Reed’s posts as I’ve been caught up on reporting the increased crime in my particular war zone. But thanks to Ishmael I was treated to this update on Fred’s [he is an ex-Marine Vietnam Veteran] anti-war literature. In this article Fred makes a case for our current brand of patriotism being an ‘after-market add-on’ and that our military men are not engaged in anything particularly noble.
I only have one thing to add to his piece, that the men who go into the military, and then return home, will eventually form the leadership for the various factions in the coming American Civil War, just as the Mexican War Veterans did for the North and the South 12 years after. Street gangs send men into the military to get there training for a reason. This will be a fractional civil war with many a regional front and that which is learned murdering enemies, and innocents, overseas will eventually be employed here in what will figure to be turmoil of karmic proportions.
For me the wild card is the U.S. military. Will the active military actually participate in the coming unrest, or will it be left to contractors, like the goons that stopped me when the curfew came down seven weeks ago? Ever since then, every time I speak with the man I was with when the four unidentified operatives rolled up on an American illegally walking on his home town’s street two blocks from his house with a friend, one of us has just said out of the blue, “Who were those guys?”
I’m wondering if other Americans across the country are soon going to have such, “Who were those guys?” moments? I am hoping, but not trusting, that the majority of military veterans will weigh in on the human side and not work as government contractors.
Check out Fred’s view of the current military at the link below.
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.” – George Orwell
“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” – George Orwell
During the last several years of my military time, I was hoping for a coup.
Then I read Hennisart's Wolves In The City.
The French generals were a lot tougher and better educated than almost anyone in US uniform today. They'd started off doing Jedburgh team jumps into occupied France in WW2, went on through the meat grinder of Indonesia (many through Dien Bien Phu) and Algeria. In the meantime, they'd gotten real educations, not degrees in Business Management from West Dickhole State like your typical US officer.
Yet when they tried to launch a coup against their govt, which was obviously betraying their country, they failed miserably, turning on each other and crawling to De Gaulle for forgiveness within days.
I understood that a career spent in a careerist organization has the effect of undermining character and training/selecting for poor moral courage, and that nobody in the US military with the rank and position to plan and launch a coup had the courage to do so successfully. I started looking for a new social value system.
Perhaps the guys coming back will run various factions in the American Civil War, but I suspect most of them will come down on the side of whatever looks most like the State.
As for Fred-he's a bit hypocritical, since his whole shtick throughout his writing career has been built on his combat service in Vietnam. That said, American public pro-military sentiment is largely of the Walmart/UFC kind. Hard to get really excited about the latest War in Dacia, but good form to thank the legionnaires.
B,
Thanks so much for this post.
I did read four books on the French Foreign Legion, which I was fascinated with from childhood. I recall one of the authors interviewing a U.S. Marine sergeant at joint maneuvers off of Corsica, who expressed admiration for the Legion. I find your Dacian comment interesting, evoking as it does an older legion—but an imperial tool nonetheless.
What is our Trajan's column, in your opinion?
Are our special ops people—as warriors coming from a feminized non-warrior society—essentially like a foreign legion?
I hope your search is going well, sir.
Hennisart's book is, in my opinion, great because it deals not with the war but with the politics of what happened once the French military won the war, at great political expense and by exposing themselves to total vilification by the better classes of French society (and they had to murder lots of people back in the Metropole, too-they had dozens of bound Arabs washing up on the banks of the Seine: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961).
DeGaulle used the victory to consolidate power over his political scene, then promptly sold Algiers, which had been a part of France in all respects, out to the FLN, betraying not only the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who'd suffered there, but also the Pieds Noirs, the ethnic French who'd been living there for over a century, the hundreds of thousands of Algerian Harkis who'd fought for the French, and the millions of Arabs who just wanted to live their lives, make a living, have kids and so on, for whom the France had assumed responsibility when they conquered the place. Of course, this was done to please the Americans, who'd put huge pressure on France and other European colonial powers over the prior decade and a half.
A minority of the French military and right wing took offense to this hideous betrayal, conspired and fought. As Hennisart describes, the O's immediately folded like laundry. Some of the true believers fought an underground war of terror in Algiers and the Metropole for years before being captured, tried and executed.
The other indispensable book on Algiers is Aussaresses' tell-all, where octogenarian Uncle Aussaresses, a terrifying 20th century badass, casually describes how, after transitioning from scholar to WW2 hero and post-WW2 commando officer with the occasional civilian intelligence detail, he was sent to Algiers, where immediately encountered a massacre of French civilians by the Arabs they'd been living and working with. Then he had it explained to him what his function would be: since the political fiction that Algiers was a part of France, with rule of law, courts, law enforcement and the rest, was indispensable, and since in a guerrilla war, courts, law enforcement and the penal are completely unequipped to handle the numbers and gravity of the crimes being committed, someone would need to fill the gap. That would be him, leading a task force of guys who would find the enemy leadership, kidnap them, torture them and execute them, unofficially, of course. Just like by peacetime standards, a guerrilla platoon commits, in a week, enough crimes for a mid-sized city for a year, Aussaresses and his guys were completely hideous criminals by those same standards. He recounts all this in detail, with wonderful black Gallic humor.
America doesn't really have a Trajan's Column for its foreign conquests. By the time it got around to being an empire, it had been captured by Unitarian cuckold-theology that saw conquest and rule as shameful. Not to be celebrated. The closest thing is post-Civil War architecture in the big East Coast cities-Union Hall in NYC and all that.
Special ops guys are like the rest of the military, but more so. There are cosmetic differences that allow you to keep, on a daily basis, more humanity, individuality and warrior honor, but it's not by an order of magnitude. No hope from that quarter-I don't think in 6 years I met anyone of Aussaresses' caliber.
My search is done. I'm a Jew, I live in my land, on a hilltop in Samaria. I make kids, worship G-d and build as I can. We're about the biggest source of irritation to the New York Times out there, as a country and a community. If they're agin' it, I'm for it.
Thanks so much for the links and the history brief, B. The books on the Legion Estranger tend to gloss over the Algerian question. I will seek out these titles.
Using the New York Times editorial bias as a benchmark for evil, is, I think, as clear an ethos as running water.