Mighty Whitey: Might Is Right As Holy Writ

                         By James J. O'Meara

                

Ragnar Redbeard
Might is Right: The Authoritative Edition
Introduction by Peter H. Gilmore; annotations by Trevor Blake
Baltimore: Underworld Amusements, 2019

From Sandy Hook to London tower

From Jaffa to Japan,

They can take who have the power

They may keep who can.

— Ragnar Redbeard

This well-preserved and surprisingly detailed illustration shows us that ancient humans, people we refer to as cavemen, were capable of surprisingly sophisticated thought and probing insight, asking themselves mankind’s oldest philosophical question: Who would win in a fight? — Dr. David Whitley[1]

Another day, another mass shooting. Well, actually, that’s only true of shitholes like Chicago or Baltimore, but the ones that count, despite being rarer than lightning strikes, are the ones involving the usual lone white gunman from Central Casting.

For example, take the recent Garlic Shooter (which sounds like something you’d buy off a late-night TV commercial), who apparently “Plugged a White Power Manifesto on Instagram.” An unfortunate choice of words, I’d say, but our correspondent, one E. J. Dickson (a pseudonym if ever I heard one), goes on to breathlessly inform us further: “‘Might Is Right’ book dates from the late 1890s, but it’s become a staple in the white supremacist canon.”

Another source gives us more details on the “plugging”:

Santino William Legan, a 19-year-old who opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting in Gilroy, California, killing three people and injuring 12, was apparently influenced by the book. Days before his shooting rampage Legan mentioned Might is Right by name in an Instagram post making a remark about the festival congesting the countryside with “hordes” of mestizos and Silicon Valley white “twats”.[2]

If, like me, you find it unlikely that a book that “dates from the late 1890s” has much relevance to “white supremacy,” to say nothing of mestizos or “Silicon Valley twats,” you might want to check it out yourself (funny how these moral panics seem to work that way). If so, then you’re in luck, as the good folks at Underground Amusements have recently gifted us with a fine new edition.

Of course, there are plenty of other editions out there; you might even have it already, unknowingly, since Anton LaVey plagiarized a good deal of it for his Satanic Bible[3] (more on that anon). A book of hard-hitting prose without copyright, preaching – well, that might is right – it appears to be catnip to basement publishers who have put out innumerable crummy editions over the years. I suppose you can find it free on the Web.

But that would be a mistake; this is the edition you should have, due to what merchandisers would call its “value-added features.” First, as one expects from Underground Amusements, it’s a big, well laid-out book, a pleasure to hold and to read. There is an Introduction from Peter H. Gilmore, High Priest of the Church of Satan, no less. It has been extensively annotated by Trevor Blake, who has also collated and compared the five official editions to produce this definitive text.[4] After the text itself, there is a 72-page section of “Mechanical Annotations” (again, of which more anon). There is a Select Bibliography of works referred to by Redbeard or used in the annotations, and for the first time, an Index!

A note on the copyright page tells us that the text “has been given Chapter, Section, and Paragraph signifiers, similar to what is found in the Bible since the Sixteenth Century.” These allow the Mechanical Annotations to collate references to any variation, from “punctuation mark to punctuation mark, character to character, word to word, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter.”

It also gives the work a subtly biblical look and feel, and that’s the key to what’s unique about this edition.

Blake says that this authoritative edition is “a harmonized text,” which is “one text drawn from several sources,” such as when Christians have, “for nearly two thousand years,” sought to “[make] the story of Jesus into a single narrative, but each attempt only reveals more contradictions.”

Actually, harmonization is not limited to, as Blake seems to imply, taking the four gospels and trying to make one story out of these supposed “eye witness accounts.”[5] The New Testament is such a ragbag that harmonization can seem to be required for any given incident within the narrative, such as the stories of the Resurrection,[6] or separate out two or more texts that have been combined so as to bring together rival factions.[7] But what Blake is really alluding to here is the work of modern scholars of the so-called Higher Criticism, who attempt to understand the scriptures by unwinding and unpacking centuries of rewriting, editing, blunders by scribes, and outright falsification.[8]

I’ve taken this brief detour into the perils of paleography because that’s what makes this a unique edition. Blake and Gilmore are treating Might is Right like holy writ. Thus, the 72-page accounting of every “jot and tittle” (Blake uses the biblical phrase) of the previous five editions, like something produced by the Jesus Seminar (but printed in two columns, like ye olde fashioned King James Bible[9]).

And Gilmore, in turn, uses (implicitly) the scriptural analogy in his anodyne account of what others have called LaVey’s plagiarism of Might is Right:

The Satanic Bible . . . made for a slim book. It didn’t yet have the sense of being like the Christian scriptures in making dramatic, stentorian pronouncements. To beef up this first book, LaVey appropriated the Enochian Keys . . . and he “Satanized” them . . . [But he still] needed something more, words that would enflame his reader’s righteous anger against the creed of servility and self-abnegation.

And so he turned to the inflammatory phrase of Redbeard which had so excited him in his youth . . . [In] homage he extracted passages wherein Redbeard parodied Christian scripture as they were perfect for the explosive curtain-raiser section, “The Book of Satan.” They provided the sought-after sense of this book being a contrarian “black gospel” – particularly once the words were edited to be consistent with LaVey’s individualist vision.

I’ve done a little editing myself here, to emphasize the points where LaVey (according to Gilmore) is basically acting like the writers of the New Testament: Taking an older gospel or epistle, say, and creating their own by cutting out some parts and adding new material, original or swiped from somewhere else; later scribes would make their own changes, to “update” the text to refer to contemporary concerns, or to suppress what seemed to be “heresy,” or perhaps just by accident.[10]

Indeed, LaVey has set a neat trap for the Christians; if they discover and cry foul over his “plagiarism,” he can counter with the example of the New Testament – tu quoque! Or should I say, touché, and pari passu![11]

Mechanical Annotator Blake concludes, with not unjustifiable pride, that, like a proponent of the Documentary Hypothesis:

My annotations could be used to unweave this Authoritative edition into its five sources. When I see a quotation from Might is Right I can determine what edition the quote is from based on my notes. If I were presented with an incomplete copy of the book, or a single page, or a fragment of a page, I could determine which edition it is from.

By “notes,” Blake is referring to the aforesaid “Mechanical Annotations.” Additionally, most pages bristle with footnotes, running down what surely must be every allusion and reference. At times, these seem a bit obsessive, if not otiose; does the audience for this book really need to be told who Napoleon was, or what year the Declaration of Independence was issued?[12] Perhaps, in another manifestation of religiosity, the idea is to produce an edition for the ages, to be read thousands of years in the future, like the New Testament.

As for allusions – perhaps a polite word for the borrowings and close paraphrases we’ve been discussing – we learn, for example, that Redbeard’s jovial examples of cannibalism throughout human history seem to have been lifted from, of all people, Charles Dickens.

Frequently turning up in these notes is the name of Max Stirner; indeed, a glance at the index shows Stirner’s name occurring more than anyone’s, other than God and Christ, with Darwin a close fourth. And here the patience of our reader is rewarded; he has no doubt been wondering when we would begin to discuss the actual content of the book.

Well, I assume that a lot of folks reading this out there already have read Might is Right, or have heard about it, or, well, can just infer the content from the title. It’s basically Stirner – whose chief, indeed, almost unique work, Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum (usually badly translated as The Ego and His Own) received its own fine new translation/edition from Underworld Amusements back in 2017.[13]

As Blake notes, Redbeard’s reliance on Stirner – like the author of Luke on Mark’s gospel –  is so close that he even uses the odd expression “wheels in your head,” which Steven T. Byington used to render Stirner’s “Du hast einen Sparren zu viel!, despite Byington’s The Ego and Its Own not appearing until over twenty years later – as well as using the same quote from Goethe,“I have founded by affair on nothing,” that Stirner would use to bookend his own book.

It’s also interesting that Redbeard’s book is as saturated with biblical quotes and allusions as Stirner’s, perhaps even more so; though Stirner had been a student of Hegel himself, he barely qualified to teach at a school for young ladies, with his examiners concluding that he “lacked precise knowledge of anything but the Bible.”[14]

The major difference between the books is that, as Blake says, “Might is Right is a book of action, not belief.” Stirner despised belief as well, but chose to express his contempt by writing a kind of parody of German – especially Hegelian – philosophy. Even so, his notion (we seem to keep falling into concepts and beliefs after all) was that what oppresses us are our beliefs, and especially other people’s beliefs. Ideas like “progress,” “justice,” “morality,” and so on are produced by us, yet have taken on an objective quasi-existence, demanding our unquestioning obedience; Stirner calls them “spooks” (as in those “wheels in your head”).[15]

Redbeard, on the other hand, in trying to create a book of action rather than belief, seems to have jettisoned the Hegelianism – hard going even when an author isn’t, like Stirner, writing a self-parody – in favor of Darwinism, red in tooth and claw. Ironically, though, it is Redbeard who is living in his head – his bat-infested belfry – not Stirner.[16] While Stirner critiques Hegelian notions of State, Freedom, Morality, Love, Duty, and so on as our own mental creations, given a fictitious existence and turned against us as spooks, Redbeard mocks and slashes out at them for being stumbling blocks on the path to mastering the world in the name of his own spook, “survival of the fittest.”[17]

“The survival of the fittest” is the scientist’s translation of the heroic age’s “Viae Victus.” Grim and harsh it may appear to nervous souls, but it is TRUE TO NATURE.

It is this massive contradiction that Blake, and to a lesser extent Gilmore, in their implicit role of Higher Critics, document extensively and deplore throughout. Buried in a footnote is this damning insight:

Redbeard crosses over from saying might is right to might makes right. Like all other claims of natural rights, humanism and religion, when what a man says should be is elevated above what is, that man is no longer his own but instead he serves his idea.

And as if from this proton pseudos, dozens more contradictions crop up throughout, each carefully cataloged by Blake. One recalls Gore Vidal’s verdict on Henry Miller:

The paradox is that if he really meant what he writes, he would not write at all. But then he is not the first messiah to be crucified upon a contradiction.[18]

Most amusing is this one, which is typical of someone with a certain kind of spook in his attic:

Kings . . . and their brain-drugged subjects have been “bonded” to the Israelite. The Jew has been supinely permitted to do – what Alexander, Caesar, Nusherwan and Napoleon[19]failed to accomplish – crown himself Emperor of the world, and collect his vast tributes from the “ends of the earth.”

Which provokes this note from Blake:

Not a few pages earlier, Redbeard wrote: “Among the Vertebrates,[20] the king of the herd (or pack) selects himself by his battle prowess – upon the same ‘general principle’ that induced Napoleon to place the Iron Crown upon his own brow WITH HIS OWN HAND.” By Redbeard’s own words and reasoning, “the Jew” is not only Emperor of the world but justly so.[21]

I’m not sure Blake is playing fair here; if the goyim have foolishly allowed the Jew to get the upper hand through his trickery, that may not be quite the same as being defeated on the battlefield (might making right and all).[22] I suppose all that matters in the end is that one gets away with it, and the goyimhave no one to blame for that but themselves.[23] Still, you would think our author could make us his mind: Did Napoleon crown himself or no? Redbeard shows the same cavalier attitude to mere facts throughout.

This brings up a final point; both Blake and Gilmore are at pains to either absolve Redbeard of the usual charges of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, or, failing that, to deplore Redbeard’s supposed “inconsistency” in writing a supposedly “individualist” rant that falls into such supposed contradictions.[24] No doubt this is a wise preemptive strategy, as shown by the media hoo-hah we noted at the start.

But it’s not at all clear that racism and anti-racism, for example, are equally spooky. As I pointed out to the academic Marxists who would coopt Stirner as a cooler kind of Marx,[25] Stirner is not an idiot; he disparages spooks, but recognizes facts, like Berlin or China, Germans and Chinamen, and does not think they are “social constructs.” To use an argument of today’s anti-Darwinists, there are theories (spooks) and there are facts.

As Stirner says:

But with the dialectical trick . . . neither you nor I will cancel the great facts of modern natural research, no more than Schelling and Hegel did.[26]

In each case, the supposed crimethink is simply recognition of facts, while the supposedly moral anti-term is the spook. As John Derbyshire has said:

Race-denialism is all over the Western world – the notion that race itself is a sort of optical illusion; that different races can, after a bit of social engineering, be brought to present the same statistical profiles on all traits; that when they present different profiles the only possible explanation is malice on the part of white people; these are the great dogmas of our age [Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion, by John McWhorter, Daily Beast, March 14,2017 ] carved on stone slabs and worshipfully preserved in the temples of our culture.[27]

“Anti-Semitism” is another spook; that is, the charge of “anti-Semitism” is a spook, intended to mislead and conceal:

In my examination of Robert Wistrich’s Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, I pointed to that author’s typically contorted argument that a “virus” existed in Europe, in which “pagan, pre-Christian anti-Semitism grafted on to the stem of medieval Christian stereotypes of the Jew which then passed over into the post-Christian rationalist anti-Judaism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Needless to say Wistrich’s phantasm, and similar poorly-fabricated ‘theories,’ are prejudiced at a very early stage by the employment of that fundamentally meaningless term: ‘anti-Semitism.’ By its very nature the term places the Jew or the ‘Semitism’ immediately in the passive position, thereby avoiding confrontation with the true essence of the problem — that there is a mutual friction between two essentially different entities, with divergent group interests and goals.[28]

A doctrine such as “white supremacy” may well be a spook, but White Nationalism is simply the recognition of the danger of white displacement, replacement, or genocide. White Nationalists don’t want to rule over the black chappies; in fact, they don’t want them around at all.[29]

Nevertheless, I’m glad that this fine new edition from Underground Amusements has given me the opportunity of finally getting around to reading this legendary work. Like the Bible, it’s really a rollicking good read, laugh out loud funny in places, and well worth spending two or three afternoons on.

Notes

[1] “Unearthed Cave Painting Of Wooly Mammoth, Saber-Tooth Tiger Reveals Humans Have Debated What Things Would Win In A Fight Since 30,000 B.C.,” The Onion, August 10, 2018.

[2] Wikipedia, quoting Kelly Weill and Andrew McNamara (July 29, 2019), “Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooting Suspect Santiago Posted Far-Right Book Moments Before Shooting”.”

[3] John Smith (another pseudonym, no doubt), “Hypocrisy, Plagiarism and LaVey”” contains comparisons of quotations from Might is Right, with similar quotations from The Satanic Bible.

[4] Blake acknowledges two previous editions as being “worthy”: the Loompanics (1984) and Darrell Conder’s Dil Pickle Press (2005); the first is the one I was guided to by Ivan Stang’s High Weirdness by Mail (that’s how we had fun before the internets); the second has been offered for sale at places like Counter-Currents. Neither, however, is as “authoritative” as the one here under review.

[5] “And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places, my friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space? . . . My friend, you have seen this incident based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn’t happen? . . . God help us . . . in the future.” Criswell, Plan Nine from Outer Space (Ed Wood, 1957), intro and outro. Is Plan Nine a (deliberate or not) parody of the New Testament, just like – according many critics, Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”? After all, Wood’s previous film Jail Bait (1954) is a remarkable “overlay” of Judeo-Christian motifs on top of a re-enactment of the Egyptian myth of Osiris, at least according to critic Rob Craig.

[6] “If much critical gospel scholarship is anywhere near the mark, it becomes clear that there was a significant evolution of, or at least diversity in, the resurrection idea within the New Testament. Was Jesus ‘spirit, not flesh,’ or ‘flesh, not spirit’? Was he slain in body and raised in spirit, or raised in a spiritual body, or raised in a body of flesh, nail scars and all? Or was he ‘exalted’ or ‘raised’ to heaven directly from the grave, so that ascension and resurrection are one?” Robert M. Price, “Is There a Place for Historical Criticism?”

[7] For example, the Book of Acts narrates one set of deeds in the first half, which it attributes to Peter; then recapitulates them under the name of Paul, so as to “harmonize” the work of the two rivals, and thus bring together their rival sects. Critics have also discerned a “Pastoral Stratum” in passages later interpolated into the (possibly) authentic letters of Paul, to provide his authority for matters of church discipline that cropped up decades later (such as “Women should not be heard” so as to silence the female Gnostic preachers who arrived long after Paul).

[8] See for example, Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (New York: HarperOne, 2011).

[9] Actually, some of those basement publishers issued Might is Right in double columns as well, no doubt to save on paper.

[10] The Epistle to the Hebrews, for example, appears to be an Essene text with “Jesus” crudely taped over the references to their martyred Teacher of Righteousness. The three letters attributed to someone named John (though not the author of the gospel or the Apocalypse) are a good example of the expansion process: an original letter edited and amplified twice (though in reverse order, 3 John being the shorter original, 1 John being the last and longest). For an excellent survey of all this, look at the prefaces to each book in Robert M. Price’s The Human Bible (Cranford, N.J.: American Atheist Press, 2015), which I reviewed here.

[11] “Touché! And pari passu! Our point is that if biologists were to approach the paleontological record as innocent of evolutionary biases as Medawar is unencumbered by Teilhardian ones, their frustration in the face of the claimed scientific status of the evolutionary theory would rival Medawar’s frustration on reading the assertion with which The Phenomenon of Man opens and on which the book turns; the assertion that “this book . . . must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less as a sort of theological essay, but purely and simply as a scientific treatise.” Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition(New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 133.

[12] “Declaration of Independence; An artefact of Revolutionary War propaganda.” Lucifer’s Lexicon (The Portable L. A. Rollins); revised and expanded edition (Baltimore: Underground Amusements, 2018).

[13] The Unique and Its Property by Max Stirner; translated with a new introduction by Wolfi Landstreicher (Baltimore: Underworld Amusements, 2017); see my review here. Though generally superior to Byington’s 1907 translation, Landstreicher loses this link to Redbeard: Byington’s “Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for ‘one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right’” becomes “Power is a fine matter, and useful for many things; for ‘one goes further with a handful of power than with a bagful of right.’”

[14] See Max Stirner: The Ego and His Own, edited and Introduced by John Carroll; in the series “Roots of the Right: Readings in Fascist, Racist and Elitist Ideology” (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971), p. 18.

[15] Landstreicher correctly translates this as “bats in your belfry.” The relation between such spooks and Jason Reza Jorjani’s “spectral” entities deserves some study; see his Prometheus and Atlas (London: Arktos Media, 2016).

[16] One thinks of the cutting irony of Hegel’s article “Who Thinks Abstractly?” in Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: Texts and Commentary(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 113-118.

[17] “Stirnerite, n. Someone who may have missed Stirner’s point.” Lucifer’s Lexicon, op. cit. Redbeard mocks “Puling, hollowchested nonentities hoping to restrain the proudly murderous blond beasts”; Stirner was killed by the bite of a poisonous insect (see Carroll, p. 28), which Marx found hilarious. Curiously, both men went into a dairy business with their wives – Stirner selling milk, Redbeard selling ice cream; Stirner failed almost immediately, while we aren’t told what happened to the Ser-Vis Ice Cream and Candy Company.

[18] Gore Vidal, “The Sexus of Henry Miller,” Book Week, August 1, 1965; reprinted in United States (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 265.

[19] Note quite the “Rule of Three”: “Star Trek captains (especially Picard) would frequently list off three examples of some well-known cultural phenomenon. Typically, two of them would be what we would consider ‘classic’ examples, and one would be either contemporary to us, or alien. For example, he might say, ‘Ah, yes, the great poets of history; William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Zyglorty Mospiqxot of T’pingnit.’ Or, ‘I’ve always been interested in classical music; Bach, Beethoven, the Beatles.’(Red Dwarf did this precise gag with ‘Mendelssohn, Mozart, Motorhead’.)”

[20] And, according to Jordan Peterson, lobsters too.

[21] Oddly enough, “Jew” does not appear in the Index at all.

[22] Or perhaps he isn’t that literal: “Actually, RR may be advocating ‘power’ more than bloody battles, thus helpfully broadening the concept of might. No one has to tell us that power is extremely important to human lives, but again, we should pay attention. This issue is at the heart of a recent debate between Eric P. Kaufman and Kevin MacDonald concerning the precipitous decline of the West and of WAS(P) and Northern European dominance of the United States.” Anthony Hilton, reviewing an earlier edition at The Occidental Observer, September 29, 2009.

[23] The aforesaid Bible is full of stories lauding Jewish trickery. Christians constantly tell the story of David and Goliath as a moral tale; in reality, David doesn’t kill Goliath with his slingshot; he cheats by hurling the stone from a distance (like a wrestling heel throwing a chair from outside the ring), knocking out Goliath, and then cutting off his head with his own sword. Not quite sporting, eh?

[24] One might compare the modern Christian who either deplores, say, Paul’s male chauvinism, or else figures some way to blame it on scribes or mistranslation. Few have the courage to take God for the author and boldly say, “And so, what’s wrong with slavery anyway?”

[25] “Max Stirner: Marxist, Meme Master or Mentor,” Counter-Currents, April 4, 2019.

[26] Max Stirner, “The Philosophical Reactionaries,” in Stirner’s Critics, translated by Wolfi Landstreicher (Berkeley, Ca.: LBC Books & Oakland, Ca.: CAL Press, 2012), pp. 106-107.

[27] John Derbyshire, “Forget Gun Control—Knife Crime Is Plaguing U.K. But You Can’t Notice Who’s Responsible!”, Unz, August 20, 2019.

[28] Andrew Joyce, “Reflections on Hilaire Belloc’s “the Jews” (1922),” Unz, September 17, 2014.

[29] All these distinctions are carefully parsed in Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2018; second edition, 2019).

Dave Chappelle: Sticks & Stones

                               By Jef Costello

           

Chappelle’s Show (2003-2006) is a favorite of many Right-wingers for its politically incorrect humor and, in particular, its irreverent attitude towards race. (It is right up there with Curb Your Enthusiasm in the estimation of many of my friends.) Only thirteen years have passed since the demise of Chappelle’s Show, but the world has changed a lot since then. The pole up the butt of the Left has now expanded to Giant Redwood dimensions. The list of things that cannot be said now runs into several volumes. Not much is funny anymore, least of all comedy.

Yes, the world has changed – but not Dave Chappelle, whose most recent Netflix special, released on August 26, is essentially a giant “FUCK YOU!” to political correctness. (Townhall accurately described Chappelle as “The Middle Finger America Needs.”) It’s a 65-minute standup routine in which Chappelle impales one sacred cow after another, leaving a forest of rotting carcasses that would earn the admiration of Vlad Țepeș. It is obvious that the man is disgusted at what has become of the country and, especially, of the entertainment industry. He delights in the destruction he brings. Chappelle aggressively refuses to be PC, to spare anyone or anything from his wit. He also challenges his audience to grow the hell up. The very title of the special implies this: Sticks and Stones, as in “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” Stop getting your knickers in a twist over words, you sniveling brats!

At one point Chappelle announces that he is going to do an impression, asking the audience to guess who it is. He then adopts a vapid look and a dumb and dumber voice:

Uh, duh. Hey! Durr! If you do anything wrong in your life, duh, and I find out about it, I’m gonna try to take everything away from you, and I don’t care when I find out. Could be today, tomorrow, fifteen, twenty years from now. If I find out, you’re fucking-duh-finished.

When the audience fails to guess who Chappelle is imitating, he announces “That’s you! That’s what the audience sounds like to me. That’s why I don’t be coming out doing comedy all the time, ’cause y’all niggas is the worst motherfuckers I’ve ever tried to entertain in my fucking life.”

Having now skewered (apparently) the “#metoo movement” and “doxing” of all sorts, Chappelle goes on to proudly identify as what he calls a “victim blamer.” He explains this with the following examples: “If somebody come up to me like, ‘Dave, Dave, Chris Brown just beat up Rihanna!’ I’ll be like, ‘Well, what did she do?’ ‘Dave, Michael Jackson was molesting children!’ I’ll be like, ‘Well, what were those kids wearing at the time?’” An entire segment of the special, in fact, is devoted to saying the unsayable concerning pedophilia. (It’s the most irreverent thing I’ve seen since the Brass Eye “Paedogeddon” special from 2001.)

Chappelle goes on to jokingly excuse Jackson’s pedophilia:

I know more than half the people in this room have been molested in their lives. But it wasn’t no goddamn Michael Jackson, was it? This kid got his dick sucked by the King of Pop. All we get is awkward Thanksgivings for the rest of our lives. You know how good it must’ve felt to go to school the next day after that shit? “Hey, Billy, how was your weekend?” “How was my weekend!? Michael Jackson sucked my dick! And that was my first sexual experience. If I’m starting here, then the sky’s the limit!”

Now, I was laughing my head off at this, but that’s not because I think pedophilia is morally permissible. And Dave Chappelle doesn’t think it is, either. It is just such a pleasure to hear a comedian being wickedagain. Comedians are supposed to be irreverent. They are supposed to have little or no respect for boundaries. A comedian who bows before the altar of political correctness is like a philosopher who refuses to question church doctrine: a pathetic sight, a castrato. Come to think of it, in fact, comedy really is a bit like philosophy. Just as philosophy can have no boundaries – philosophers must be free to question literally everything – so a comedian must be free to ridicule literally everything.

And, like philosophy, comedy reveals truth. So, while we can agree that Michael Jackson’s pedophilia cannot be condoned, it’s also true that meeting Michael Jackson really wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to those kids. Chappelle dares to say this. And he dares to say much else. A good deal of his humor is directed at the LBGTQ crowd (did I forget any letters?) – who he refers to as “the alphabet people.” But I’m not going to get into that, just because I don’t want to spoil the show for those who haven’t watched it yet. (I’ve already revealed too much.) This show is a goldmine of un-PC humor. And half the fun is thinking about all the butthurt it has caused in all the right people.

Indeed, the response has been absolutely predictable. The discrepancy between the audience response and the response of professional critics has already been the subject of news coverage. On Rotten Tomatoes a whopping 99% of audience members (i.e, non-critics) rated it positively. Initially, 0% (yes, you read that right – zero percent) of critics gave Chappelle a favorable review. This figure eventually creaked up to 17% and has now peaked at a measly 27%. Fifteen critics are included in this survey, whereas more than 34,000 non-critics weighed in.

Writing for The Atlantic, someone named Hannah Giorgis says, “Sticks and Stonesregisters as a temper tantrum, the product of a man who wants it all – money, fame, influence – without much having to answer to anyone.” (Hannah is a woman of color with Roseanne Roseannadanna hair who looks like she just turned 21, and whose qualifications as a film critic are, shall we say, dubious.) “Sticks & Stones exists as a defiant design to intentionally offend large swaths of the audience Chappelle deems too thin-skinned and easily outraged, while serving up simple, low-bar yucks to anyone yearning for validation of their anti-P.C. stance.” This breathless mouthful comes from Melanie McFarland of Salon. Both Hannah and Melanie, by the way, have managed to achieve the status of “top critics” at Rotten Tomatoes.

“Author” and “transgender activist” Ian Thomas Malone opines, “Lacking empathy can certainly be amusing, but Sticks & Stonesis a tired routine by a man who forgot to layer jokes into his act, too often sounding like a pundit on Fox News.” Allison Herman of The Ringer warns, “It’s a symbiotic cycle with no end in sight.” Right. Whatever the fuck that means. A few critics and media figures have been more positive. Probably the best tweet so far has come from American Psychoauthor Brett Easton Ellis: “Did I just watch Dave Chappelle save America from itself in 65 minutes on Netflix?” And a number of Chappelle’s fellow comedians have come to his defense.

The contrast between the comments of critics and those of ordinary folks could not be more striking. Here’s a sampling of what the ordinary folks posted:

Funny stuff from Dave Chappelle. I think the critics don’t know the meaning of sticks and stones.

Hilarious and brilliant. Don’t pay attention to the critics’ reviews.

Quite possibly the Best Stand Up of the last 25 years. What real comedy looks like and should be.

HILARIOUS! Anti PC for people that don’t know what “comedy” means. Something the culture needed.

Absolutely amazing! Perfect timing for what has slowly but surely become a clown world. Chappelle is dropping truth bombs left and right, and the critical score shows that, truly, the critics do not even understand the title of “Sticks & Stones.” Everyone needs to not only watch this but understand it. Dave, we love you!

All great comics through history have been subversive. They are at the front line of speaking truth to power. The mainstream progressives have become the censorious church lady of the past. They are religiously possessed by political correctness.

It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of how out of touch professional, PC critics are with audiences. And it’s also hard to imagine how one could need any more proof that such “writers” are given a platform precisely because they have passed a political litmus test, and precisely in order to push a political agenda. It’s a desiccated, humorless, tired agenda of which ordinary people have clearly had enough. And they are more and more willing to stand up and say so. They are also voting with the feet: tuning out and turning off TV shows and channels heavy with PC bias.

Dave Chappelle’s Sticks and Stones is one of the most heartening hours of television I’ve seen in a long time. Watch it (without delay) and you’ll see what I mean. I would like to appoint Dave Chappelle as Counter-Currents’Honorary White Man of 2019, or any year.

Rammstein Needs To Retire

                           By Scott Weisswald

         

Du hast mich gefragt, und ich antwortete: Rammstein needs to retire.

Coming on the heels of a long hiatus, Rammstein’s new self-titled (or untitled, depending on who you ask) album is more a testament to how tired Rammstein’s shtick has become than an invigorating piece of heady, wild metal. Rammstein’s silence was broken by the lead single off this record, “Deutschland,” and featuring cover art depicting a black woman wielding a sw11ord to accompany it, the quality of this album was rather easily predicted. Rammstein hasn’t truly been relevant since the very early 2000s, and largely depends on performative hyperbole and their rough, “German” image that lends them some degree of exoticism and perceived genuineness among the audience they found abroad. Put simply, Rammstein has never been much more than a relatively gimmicky Neue Deutsche Harte band that found unlikely success globally with a sound that relied on the same tropes as any other metal-goes-pop outfit – with an extra dash of helpful stereotyping. In Tim Lindemann’s own words, “German is the language of anger.”

This attitude towards one’s own homeland is in clear focus on this record, beginning the circus with the aforementioned lead single “Deutschland,” which opens in one of the most poetic ways possible: A reference to the band’s largest single to date. The opening lines, “Du hast . . .,” convey just how creaky the band’s joints are in a way that no critic ever could put into words. Of course, to the average Rammstein listener, this is fan service at its finest; playing off the nostalgia of their initial forays into fame in order to give this newest effort even a slight claim to legitimacy. The unfortunate truth is, however, that Deutschland sounds more like a passable Linkin Park B-side than a skull-crushing East German power trip, if one is to ignore Lindemann’s growling about du, ich, and wir, or his tongue-in-cheek “Deutschland über allen,” followed, of course, by the most telling line of the entire song: “Ich kann dir meine Liebe nicht geben,” or in English, “I cannot give you my love.” It’s rather difficult to tell who this music is being made for: Germans who legitimately dislike their own homeland? Clueless Americans who have no idea what is even being said? The instrumentals are entirely lackluster, and would probably be better received as some kind of dance-rock or hardcore club tomfoolery than “metal,” so this is certainly not meant for rabid headbangers, either. Rammstein, despite their manufactured German image, is yet another rootless, globalized hit machine churning out music that will burst across the radio waves and then be forgotten within the span of the next record cycle.

Speaking of radio, the album’s second entry, “Radio,” opens on rhythm guitar and square synth, a formula that doesn’t change much throughout the 4 minutes and 37 seconds of a song that amounts to little more than a chorus clearly designed for catchiness and not much else (“Radio, mein Radio”) and occasional power chords. The verses that make up this track all follow the same uninspired cadence, and again touch on the most boring, safe topics possible: music, the radio, keine Grenzen (no borders). For a band that previously prided itself on shock value and dealt with such publicly reviled topics as violence both physical and sexual, personal hate, and pyromania, safe subjects like free love and open borders seem incredibly out of place. One could ramble on endlessly about Rammstein’s music and how poorly it has aged, but if any one thing is to be cited when calling for the band to lay down their instruments, it’s the fact that they’re writing songs about European establishment talking points. If you’re supporting the status quo, posing as some kind of subversive, edgy group is nothing more than that: posing.

 “Zeig Dich” initially offers something a bit more listenable given the juxtaposition of an operatic wail with grating rhythm guitar work, but unfortunately, the countless artistic directions one could have taken with such a track are thrown out the window in favor of a dusty, endlessly-repeated pop metal formula consisting of power chords, two-syllable mantra choruses, and an entirely uninspired melody that hits every safe spot in its key in arpeggio fashion. There really is not much to say about this song: No one section particularly stands out, but there’s nothing to be gleaned from the track as a whole, either. On every quarter note, a kick drum. Every half note, a snare drum. Hi-hats roll in between. Distorted guitars and phlegm-choked utterances from the back of the throat coat the remainder of the track until the very end, when the opera returns; and once it’s all been said and done, one can’t help but think that it’s quite a shame the opera had to go away at all.

The forebodingly-named “Ausländer” (foreigner) tells the story of a man at home “everywhere,” a man whose language is “international.” No matter where he goes, he is an Ausländer, a word of contention in Germany. There is no way to get through this track without cringing; it oozes with a pallid, painfully white brand of internationalism that consists of vague references to one’s own mystery, relying on the mythos surrounding a man who spends only a few hours in each town, and a chorus composed in German, English, French, and Russian. No other group of people on Earth feel like this other than a small group of cosmopolitan, equally self-loathing yet narcissistic white folk who have access to money. Overall, “Ausländer” is a perfect representation of the state in which much of Europe lies: People who don’t feel at home where they’re from, and pride themselves on being “foreign” in the other lands they meander too. We can only wonder if Lindemann is aware of the irony that his ditty used only European languages in its chorus.

The charmingly named “Sex” provides a momentary reprieve – if one revels in kitsch. It’s a bit of a throwback to the edgy, earlier days of Rammstein, driven by a vaguely sensual bassline with the tops of its frequency range lopped off. Lyrically, the song covers every aspect of what Rammstein must imagine a sexual encounter is like, from flirting (plenty of the song is a compliment about a woman’s breasts or genitals) to ecstasy (screaming “Sex!”), and finally, hedonistic nihilism (“We only live once”). Alas, what surely would have been a real stickler in the sides of parents and the suited public in the ‘90s is now almost milquetoast. In an era full of child drag queens, public sex acts in the name of “pride,” and countless smartphone applications dedicated to the most meaningless and casual sex possible, a song about heterosexual desire is far from edgy, provocative, or even remotely interesting. Men in their 50s yelling about breasts might inspire a Boomer or two, but to everyone else, it just sounds like noise.

“Puppe” may be the worst offender on the album when it comes to watered-down production. This track features literal trap instrumentals: a snare drum on the second and fourth note with syncopated kick drums dancing about it. There is, however, one particularly graceful moment on this song and the record as a whole: For once, Rammstein decided this album deserved a deconstructed, crunchy reprieve from a vaguely synthetic bassline and the same power chords, and for about ten seconds we’re given headache-inducing drum-pummeling and Lindemann gutturally bemoaning his own behavior of biting out the neck on a doll, almost as if he was gasping for air, suffocating under the weight of his own persona. This moment of random ingenuity doesn’t last long, however, and the rest of the song takes on a doom-like atmosphere, rolling out the same tropes, tricks, and traditions that have marked every generic radio-friendly metal song over the last two centuries. Who knows what the story behind “Puppe” is; we may only ponder what it might have been.

“Was ich liebe” takes on a Volbeat-like composition, drowned in atmosphere and effect to the point that nothing is discernible on its own except for a synth melody that appears about midway through that inescapably sounds like Billie Eilish, once you make the comparison. Of course, since Rammstein doesn’t like sticking to the same cliché for long, atmosphere is broken up by diluted rhythmic slamming or pedaled plucks on the high side of a guitar. In terms of messaging, there is not much to say other than that this song attempted to be depressing, with whiny verses about how the things you love shrink away from you. It makes sense, then, that this song seems to go on for so long.

“Diamant” is an attempt at a downtempo, brooding love song. On no front is Rammstein more deserving of criticism than in its incredibly tired set of formulas and clichés, and this is painfully apparent on “Diamant,” with descriptions of one’s object of desire as a “diamond” and the typical, bland Gen X pessimism of decreeing that a diamond is “just a rock.” This track is the shortest on the album, at 2 minutes 34 seconds, and deserves some credit for fizzling out after it finished making just one round about its exhausting songwriting, rather than the seemingly endless repetition of the album’s other cuts.

“Weit Weg” begins almost like a Paul Kalkbenner transition track. This is quickly thrown out in favor of a pseudo-hair metal approach, offering all of the cringe and none of the nostalgia. A sweeping, organ-programmed synthesizer plods throughout the song’s key while an unenthusiastic Schneider drops his sticks on the kick drum in the same pattern that he has for ninety percent of the album. Much like the other filler tracks on here, there isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said. This song is tiring, uninventive, and completely forgettable. There isn’t even a hamfisted sociopolitical message to chew on; just more dreck. Perhaps that’s the real sociopolitical message.

“Tattoo,” the penultimate track, begins with a Slayer-like thrash opener and morphs into another – moderately ghastly – Rammstein track. Peppered with elementary metaphor, such as that of writing a letter on burning paper (but the paper is one’s skin!), “Tattoo” is a prime example of Rammstein running out of material after exploring a new idea. It’s unfortunate that much of this record is conceptually interesting at its base, but every original idea that manages to peek its head out of the water is inevitably smothered in pop-metal building blocks. The end result is tracks only worth a second thought if they’re of boisterous annoyance (“Sex”) or self-important obliviousness (“Ausländer”). Hopefully, nobody tattoos any of the lyrics from “Tattoo” on themselves, unless they’re trying to prove a very important point.

“Hallomann” ends the record fittingly. Almost every confusing, boring, or misfit Rammstein patchwork used to stitch this album together happily prances back on stage, whether it’s the power chords, choral operatics (which, when listened to individually and together, sound nearly identical), unseasoned vocal cadence, or even public enemy number one, the syncopated and synthesized trap drumline. Generally speaking, a record’s last track is often an indication of a group’s future output, or is otherwise a closing rumination on an album’s themes, but it would appear that Rammstein opted instead for a filler track that runs the gamut of their previous sins, almost as if to remind us that we actually listened to this entire release.

Truth be told, the closing track’s intentions don’t matter all that much; you’re bound to forget just about all of this album in a few hours, anyway.

Be All You Can Be: On Joining The Military

                             By Ash Donaldson

         

You have asked me whether you should join the military. Given what I wrote, you wonder, does a racially conscious white male have any business in the armed forces? I cannot give you a definite yes or no, but I will share some of my observations after more than two decades of wearing the uniform.

Socrates was once asked a similar question by one of his students, Xenophon, and looking at their situation helps to shed light on the challenges and opportunities that await you. Lest I seem to be inviting comparisons between myself and the philosopher, let it be known that I’d much rather have Xenophon’s life.[1] But we do have this much in common: multiple military deployments – my own to the Forever War in the Mideast, those of Socrates to Athens’ own endless war against Sparta. In the popular imagination, the dominant image of Socrates is akin to his portrayal in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure: a paunchy old man, anachronistically wearing a Roman toga, asking unanswerable questions. According to Plato, however, the stonemason-turned-philosopher also served as a hoplite, the heavy infantry of his day, on at least three deployments during the Peloponnesian War. Two of these were to the distant theater of Chalcidice, and on a third he won particular acclaim for his actions at the Battle of Delium in 424 BC.[2] These events occurrred when Xenophon was a mere child, and Athens surrendered before he had a chance to be at any decisive engagement.[3] Three years later, however, he received a recruitment letter in the mail, so to speak, from his friend Proxenus.[4]Xenophon was invited to join a mercenary expedition to Persia – an All-Volunteer Force, much like our own.

None of the soldiers serving in what history would remember as the March of the Ten Thousand were drafted or obligated to serve in any way, which makes the dynamics particularly relevant for us. And it is during times when one need not enter the military that doing so makes an especially powerful appeal to the adventurous-minded young man. Despite the ongoing emasculation of the modern military through gender-bending experiments and PC doublethink, military service remains the closest thing we have to a tribal rite of passage for young males. Take anyone you wish; once he has gone through boot camp and his initial training, he will return home with a different bearing and greater confidence. He has been put to the test, and the more severe that test has been, the greater the change will be.

Combat will be an even greater test. Although the war you fight in may be pointless or even immoral, the way you fight it will make all the difference to you, your descendants, and the God or Gods you follow. Although the modern world tries to deny it, our nature as men is innately bound up with death and the taking of life, just as women are tied to the giving and nurturing of life. As Robert Heinlein said, “Fulfillment in life is loving a good woman and killing a bad man.” Having done both, I agree. If you feel this ancient pull strongly, consider joining the Marines or Army infantry, or the special forces of any service.

For Xenophon, seeing combat was not a possibility, but a certainty. Being of noble family, he would have been expected to serve as a cavalryman and provide his own war-horse at enormous personal expense. In any campaign inside Greece, he would have served as a scout, and also fought in the initial skirmishing before the phalanxes clashed. But on the plains of Mesopotamia, facing an enemy as strong in cavalry as the Persians were, it was imperative that he and his fellow cavalrymen helped to prevent the Greek infantry from being outflanked. His chances of coming back alive were no better than an infantryman’s. Although Xenophon does not say so, I suspect that Socrates had reservations about this promising young man joining what could be a fatal endeavor for him. Socrates had seen plenty of death in a war that cost Athens the lives of nearly a third of her citizens.

Today, by contrast, the majority of service members, even those deployed to our rather large “combat zones,” never see combat. Of course, there has always been a high ratio of support personnel to combat troops, but modern technology has made distance killing the norm. Faced with the political volatility of casualties, our political masters prefer to conduct drone strikes or launch cruise missiles – though this does little to change the situation on the ground. I’ve seen “nefarious” drivers of front-end loaders taken out by drones that were piloted by desk jockeys thousands of miles away, who clock out as soon as their shift is over and hit the gym. And the further removed people are from the actual fighting, it seems, the more they need to be told what great warriors they are. Everyone is “the tip of the spear” these days. You haven’t fully experienced the absurdity of the modern military until you’ve seen a guy who puts together PowerPoint presentations for a living refer to himself in this way. And he believes it, too.

But while the risk of death or wounding might be small compared to Xenophon’s day, it is still very real. There have been more than seven thousand American service members killed and over fifty thousand wounded in our various adventures in the sandbox since 2001. And to what purpose? The mission of the deployment Xenophon wanted to join was to install Cyrus the Younger on the throne of Persia by ousting his older brother, Artaxerxes. In other words, regime change in the Middle East. Anyone enlisting today will find themselves part of the same endeavor, sans a clearly-defined mission or exit strategy, and subject to the whims and blunders of an army of bureaucrats rather than the inspired leadership of a man such as Cyrus.[5] There is a chance, then, that you may die or be maimed in some shithole of a country for no other reason than that the natives don’t want you in their homeland. What a sad way for anyone – much less a proud descendant of a fair race – to end his life. At the very least, you will spend much time away from your own homeland and family “to seek another’s profit, and work another’s gain,” bringing the gifts of democracy, gender equality, and global capitalism to the benighted lands of Muspelheim. The time I have spent on such fruitless deployments is something I can reckon in years, not months.

Plutarch relates an anecdote from when the Spartan king Agesilaus, during one of his frequent expeditions against the Thebans, was wounded in combat. A fellow Spartan, displaying that frankness toward kings which characterizes his polis, remarked, “What a wonderful teacher’s fee you are getting from the Thebans for having taught them to fight when they had no wish or ability to do so.” This, Plutarch explains, is why Lycurgus, the legendary founder of Sparta’s unique society, forbade frequent military campaigns against the same people, to prevent their becoming skilled in fighting.[6] I fear that we, like Agesilaus, are giving many nations a great deal of profitable lessons, and at great cost to ourselves.

Unlike Xenophon, however, you will have the option of choosing a support field, if the challenge of combat is not your driving motivation. (Just realize that, unless you are sitting in an ICBM silo or monitoring strategic satellites, you will almost certainly deploy, and in many of these areas, the front lines start right outside the base’s gate.) A young white male should give some consideration to career fields that correspond to blue-collar skilled trades in the civilian world. That route is not something to be slighted, for it is going to be increasingly difficult for white males to make it past the diversity requirements for colleges and corporations. White-collar jobs, if they are not outright replaced by automation, will go to foreigners and non-white minorities who can claim they “enrich” the work force. In such a situation, as RamZPaul recently pointed out, there are still plenty of opportunities for white males to apprentice in the skilled trades, such as electrician, plumber, HVAC repair, civil engineering, and the like. There is an increasing need for people with such skills, and you would enjoy a better standard of living than the snowflakes churned out by our universities and saddled with debt. Should you wind up an independent contractor, you would be free from the diversity indoctrination that is par for the course in most companies. The military is a good place to start for this route, since your training will be at government expense and will apply toward a certification. And in any future ethnostate, there will be a great need for people with such skills.

When Xenophon sought his mentor’s guidance, Socrates’ initial response was that joining Cyrus’ expedition might create political complications for Xenophon back in Athens. As a satrap in Asia Minor, Cyrus had followed a pro-Sparta policy during the Peloponnesian War, and Athens would not have been thrilled by one of her scions helping to make him King. Such a prospect did not daunt Xenophon, who, like other members of Athens’ “Dissident Right,” had great admiration for Sparta. Years later, he would even accompany King Agesilaus against Athens at the Battle of Coronea.[7]His exile, whether it preceded this act or followed it, opened up great opportunities for him, for he was able to enjoy a large estate under Spartan protection, and he was given an unparalleled outsider’s glimpse at Spartan training, which he captured for posterity.[8]

As for today, there is no doubt that joining the military can involve a member of today’s Dissident Right in numerous political (and moral) complications, but as with Xenophon, that experience might also open up opportunities. First, the bad news. A host of regulations restrict the political activity of service members, and these will put a damper on any plans to engage in such activity with like-minded people. Second, as a white male, you will be in a minority, albeit a substantial one: according to the military’s own figures, 44.5% of active-duty members of the armed forces are white, non-Hispanic males. While that is a higher percentage than the population as a whole, one has even less choice in the military than in the civilian world to choose one’s milieu. Here again, you can affect your chances somewhat by your choice of field. Enter a highly technical one, such as satellite operations, and you will be among more whites and Asians. Join the Marine Corps, and you will be among far more males, but experience scarcely less racial diversity. No matter what path you take, however, not only will you serve alongside people of all races, you will be housed with them – if not stateside, then on deployment. You will not be able to simply move away to a more distant suburb. The same street gangs that culturally enrich Los Angeles and Chicago perform the same service within the military.

More importantly, the very tone of the modern military is hostile to white males, something that Xenophon, living in an ethnostate, did not have to deal with. The prospect is even worse if you have any sort of affinity for traditional social values. As I pointed out, the military is not just opening up its ranks to people from all backgrounds and sexual orientations; it is actively recruiting them.[9] True, there is a default respect in the military for hierarchy, but this very hierarchy seems hell-bent on tearing down identity, specifically white male identity. The bean-counters in the Pentagon are obsessed with increasing the racial and gender diversity in the ranks. Reading their annual reports is a revealing glimpse at the mindset of people who are determined that the demographic replacement of whites in America be matched within the military ranks, at all levels.

These gentlemen work hand-in-glove with the commissars in charge of the notorious Equal Opportunity programs, which preach the new gospel of “diversity is our greatest strength.” These programs are none too subtle in suggesting that it is white males who are the problem: They are the past, and they are the perpetrators of all that threatens this blessed unity-in-diversity. Should you join, you will undergo periodic indoctrination sessions that stress – rather absurdly – both how open-minded the military is and how the full force of military justice will come down upon you should you ever veer from that course.

But if you can endure a foretaste of what awaits all Americans in a progressive totalitarian state, military service does offer advantages for aspiring leaders in our movement. If we are to have any political aspirations, either through entryism, a third party, or some combination of the two, having veteran status can go a long way for a political candidate. Outside the ranks of the antifa, there is a grudging respect for veterans even on the Left, and this experience need not be very salty.[10]Speaking from personal experience, I can say that people treat you differently when you wear a hat identifying yourself as a war veteran. I don’t mean the “thank you for your service” accolades that sound fine coming from an old granny, but rather hollow coming from an able-bodied hipster. In our era of profound rudeness, most whites, at least, are a tad more circumspect in their negative comments about – and toward – veterans. It makes no difference whether they are neocon flag-wavers who fully endorsed John McCain or progressives who lament the wars that Bush began. One side invests soldiers with sainthood, the other with martyrdom. Either way, there is a widespread respect for military service in America which we would be fools to ignore.

I have met people who, perhaps influenced by Heinlein, fantasize that in a profound breakdown of society, the ranks of the military would somehow provide the needed order. Xenophon’s own expedition experienced just as dramatic a collapse in leadership. When the Ten Thousand achieved their own “Mission Accomplished” at the Battle of Cunaxa, their victory proved as fleeting as that of Bush the Younger (or the Elder, for that matter). Although they had acquitted themselves well on the battlefield, Cyrus the Younger died in the fighting, and with him all their hopes for success. Then, through the subterfuge of a parley, the Persians captured and executed the entire senior leadership of the Greek army.[11] So now, thousands of miles from home, surrounded by enemy forces and a hostile population, the Greeks faced the daunting prospect of having to fight their way home. In the resulting leadership vacuum, junior leaders like Xenophon had the opportunity to rise to the top and prove their fitness to command.

But Xenophon’s military was an army on the march; men who, while they came from many different poleis, had a common background and shared values in comparison with the patchwork quilt of ethnicities all around them. What can be said of the Ten Thousand cannot be said of our Two Million: when we deploy, we are more akin to the polyglot army of Xerxes, amassed from all races of the Earth, fighting those to whom tribal, ethnic, and religious identity still matter.

Many people have an image of the military gleaned from movies or their Uncle Bob’s stories. But today’s armed forces, being voluntary, are not only self-selecting, but self-culling. You might call it the survival of the most politically correct. During the Obama administration, there was a quiet but significant exodus of more traditional Christians from the military ranks as a result of the legalization of open homosexuality and a clampdown on Christianity.[12]Trump’s election has done nothing to change the atmosphere within the ranks, in which feminists, homosexuals, and minorities flourish, and a straight white male’s only hope is to be completely cucked. Junior enlisted members and young officers may not have fully drunk the Kool-Aid, but there’s less and less need for them to do so: Thanks to popular culture, they’ve been raised on it.

So I see no reason to believe that in any future social collapse or crisis, the military would somehow become a bastion of white identity. After many years of being conditioned by progressive ideology, the vast majority of servicemen prove rather docile when it comes time for the next experiment in social engineering.[13] The reflexive training that characterizes the modern military has resulted in a kind of Orwellian duckspeak when it comes to diversity. Not toeing the line, after all, simultaneously jeopardizes one’s pension, one’s health care, and all the rest of the impressive socialist benefits the US military enjoys. Outright disobedience can lead to a dishonorable discharge and a lifetime of difficulty finding employment; worse yet, it can end at Leavenworth.

But if I am not sanguine about the military qua military performing any beneficial role for us in a social collapse, I do think individual veterans have an important role to play in our movement. These men have seen the failures of globalism on a truly epic scale, and have an enviable fund of experiences and skills on which to draw. Having fought both the Varsity and JV teams of Islam, they will be less likely to flinch at the antifa’s men-without-chests. And they will have a more practical frame of mind, providing a needed balance to some of the loftier notions that captivate men’s imaginations but seldom put their hands to work. One notices such a contrast when comparing Xenophon’s Socrates to Plato’s: the soldier of fortune presents his teacher as far less interested in epistemology than with self-discipline, much more certain about what constitutes virtue, and quite ready to defend the morality of harming one’s enemies.[14] Here is the hoplite who mounted guard during the Thracian winter and stood his ground at Delium.

So what did Socrates advise Xenophon? He told him to journey to Delphi and consult the Oracle. But the young man cleverly asked the Oracle not whether he should go or stay behind, but rather to which of the Gods he should offer prayer and sacrifice in order for his endeavor to be a successful one. When Socrates learned that his pupil had merely asked for the Gods’ blessing, he was not pleased. Presented with a religious fait accompli, however, he had no choice but to go along: Xenophon’s Socrates is far more certain about the Gods.[15]

If he had died at Cunaxa, or at the hands of the Kurds on the return march, Xenophon would not even be a name in a footnote. Instead, he faced more challenges than he could have imagined and overcame them, then retired to the life of a country gentleman. He went on to write an account of the expedition, along with a treatise on Spartan society, and other works on history, politics, philosophy, economics, tactics, hunting, and horsemanship, all of which are held in high esteem.[16] In fact, I think a future ethnostate could do worse than to have a Xenophontian academy to train young men of both action and thought.

Ultimately, this is how I think you should frame the question: Would it strengthen our movement for you to join the military? I cannot give you a definite answer, because I don’t know the specifics of your situation. There are many young men I would advise to stay well clear of the military, for their talents can be better used elsewhere. But others might end up acquiring just the sort of confident voice and depth of experience that we need. Would Xenophon have been the same man had he never gone on his ill-fated mission to the Middle East? Or would Socrates have been the same man, and faced death the same way, had he not been a hoplite? Both Plato and Xenophon suggest not.

I return to that moment when the leaders of the Ten Thousand had been murdered, and the de facto leaders gathered in the night to discuss the army’s plight. They were over a thousand miles’ march inside enemy territory; they had no guides; their native supporters had disappeared; they had no cavalry; and they were surrounded by millions of people hostile to them. Many of the Greeks were panicking, and Xenophon freely relates a nightmare that his father’s house was burning, which he feared meant there would be no escape.[17] But when it was Xenophon’s turn to speak at the informal council, he gave many good pieces of advice, one of which applies to our work in rousing our Folk today:

But if we can change their minds, if we can get them to think, not “What is going to happen to me?” but “What action am I going to take?” what a rise in their spirits there will be.[18]

Whatever your decision may be, let it be yours, and may it work toward the goal of creating a civilization that recalls the best of Xenophon’s.

Ash Donaldson is a veteran of the war against ISIS – the Muslim group, that is, not the goddess. A refugee from academia, he lives in exile somewhere in the Midwest. His most recent book is From Her Eyes a Doctrine, a dystopian novel of America’s future. He is also the author of Blut and Boden: A Fairy Tale for Children of European Descent, and the sequel, A Race for the North. See more on Preservation of Fire.

Notes

[1] I’ve also been rather critical of Socrates elsewhere. See Europa Sun, No. 4, “Front Row Seats to Civilization’s End.”

[2] This comes from the Apology (28d-29a), the Symposium (219e-221c), and the Laches(181b). Historians are inclined to believe Plato, and I also see little reason to doubt him on this score, since he would know such claims could be easily refuted and undermine the points he was trying to make.

[3] Historians variously place his birth anywhere from 431 to 427 BC. I incline toward the later date, since during a key discussion on the expedition in 401 BC, he addresses the idea that he might be too young to replace Proxenus, who was 30 when he was treacherously slain. See Xenophon’s Anabasis, 2.6.20, 3.1.13, and 3.1.25.

[4] Xenophon’s account of his enlistment is given in the Anabasis, 3.1.4-8.

[5] Xenophon’s admiration is clear from the chapter he dedicates to Cyrus’ character in the Anabasis, 1.9, and from the mirror of princes he models on Cyrus, the Cyropaedia.

[6] Plutarch, Apophthegmata Laconica 213f. Translation by author.

[7] Xenophon, The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika, ed. Robert B. Strassler, xviii. Xenophon even wrote a book on household management and agriculture, the Oeconomicus. It is available in the Penguin volume of Xenophon’s Conversations of Socrates.

[8] This work is available as an appendix to the Penguin volume Plutarch on Sparta.

[9] This is especially pronounced among females, where the number of lesbians is quite striking. As for the much-touted ban on transgender personnel, which went into effect in April 2019, it is anything but. It expires in less than a year, grandfathers those already in service, and allows waivers for anyone else. (The main sticking point is actually money, since the generous military health plan covers sexual reassignment surgery).

[10] Witness the career of Pete Buttigieg, who as a Navy intelligence officer had a basic training consisting of a two-week, laid-back “fork and knife” school, then went about his merry way as a reservist. After a six-month stint in Afghanistan in a “Threat Finance Cell” and a few choice poses with an M-4, he was presented to the public as a cross between Rambo and Henry Kissinger. Tulsi Gabbard, a Major in the Hawaii National Guard, also capitalizes on her military service, which she was able use to much advantage in her stinging shut-down of Tim Ryan during the Democratic debates. Neither one was in a combat branch of their respective services. Anyone not in the military should be wary when someone uses the term “combat zone”: today it encompasses virtually the entire Middle East, including countries where service members’ greatest concern is taking Latin dance lessons or tanning by the pool during their abundant free time.

[11] Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.5, 2.6.

[12] Don’t get the notion that it was all Obama’s fault. As my earlier piece makes clear, this transformation has been a long time coming.

[13] The popular notion that the military is a bastion of conservativism is largely an illusion. It may have been true in the 1980s, but times have changed. Not only has the military become more racially diverse, with all that entails for political orientation, but years of legally-enforced tolerance have created a general indifference toward social morality. When my unit was briefed on the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” nearly ten years ago, the senior officer who came from on high began the question-and-answer period this way: “Any questions are welcome, provided they don’t involve morality.” True, in the 2016 Presidential Election, those in uniform favored Trump to Clinton by a near two-to-one margin, but that has much to do with the fact that the military is 84% male. Given a viable alternative, these same voters vastly prefer a libertarian option. In 2012, political donations by servicemen to the Ron Paul campaign were more than to all other candidates, Democrat and Republican, combined, and as late as September during the 2016 campaign, Gary Johnson polled dead-even with Trump among military members. The data tallies with my personal experience: Most service members want a strong military, but one that is used less frequently and on less dubious missions; all other issues quickly recede in importance.

[14] On this last point, contrast Crito 49a-d with Philebus 49d. For a general overview of these differences, see the introduction to Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates, published by Penguin.

[15] He argues against atheism at length in Memorabilia 1.4 and for the Gods’ active benevolence in 4.3.

[16] His work On Horsemanship is still respected by equestrians. While his principal work of history, the Hellenica, may not be of Herodotean or Thucydidean caliber, without it we would have only the vaguest notion of what happened between 411 and 362 BC. The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika is a handsome edition with extensive maps and notes to aid the reader.

[17] Anabasis, 3.1.

[18] Anabasis, 3.1.41. Translation by author.

Sword Of Dishonor: The Reasons For The Decline Of America's Military

                           By Ash Donaldson

   

For decades, the opening lines of a poem by Sam Walter Foss entitled “The Coming American” hung in big steel letters at the Air Force Academy. Year after year, incoming classes of cadets would finish their six weeks of basic training by marching under the words BRING ME MEN. Up the ramp, they went onto the Academy’s impressive terrazzo flanked by modernist architecture, scene of the next four arduous years. Each cadet memorized the lines that came next:

Bring me men to match my mountains,

Bring me men to match my plains,

Men with empires in their purpose,

And new eras in their brains.[1]

In 2003, the Academy officialdom deemed those words to be offensively gender-specific and ordered them removed. As it happened, nearly half a century of sunlight had etched the shadow of the letters onto the granite underneath, making the words as legible as before. Workmen with power sanders were dispatched to finish the damnatio memoriae. Then, after an entire year of brainstorming for a suitably inspiring quote to replace the old one, the Air Force displayed its complete poverty of thought by erecting its bland “core values”: “Integrity first, Service before self, Excellence in all we do.”[2]

This month I retire from the military after twenty years. That service includes two wars and service in multiple branches of the military across a wide range of specialties. A few dozen enemies no longer walk this Earth because of orders I have given. On my mantel rests an Academy saber; above it is the Bronze Star I received in Iraq. And yet I find myself wondering what it was all for.

One might be tempted to write this off as the existential crisis of middle age, but it is a sentiment shared by those who have witnessed first-hand the dramatic transformation of the military over the past two decades. Members of a dying breed, we sense that once we are gone, the profession of arms will hardly be recognizable. That profession, like civilization itself, is a precarious thing: it only takes a couple of generations for the continuity to break down. Bringing it back is no easy matter.

This sea-change has a particularly bitter taste to those who are being either forced into retirement, not promoted, or downsized (dubbed “force shaping”) because they are the wrong race and the wrong gender, at a time when the military makes no secret of its enthusiasm for affirmative action in recruitment and promotion.[3] In the past decade, it has added sweeping changes: the green light for open homosexuality in 2011, the opening of all combat positions to women in 2015, the allowance of transgender individuals in 2016.[4] Attempts to place all the blame with the Obama administration ignore more permissive attitudes in society at large. More importantly, the military’s seemingly precipitous decline is the outcome of two tendencies that have been eating away at its aristocratic spirit for over a century: egalitarianism and managerialism.

The “Embarrassment of Choosing”

Alexis de Tocqueville, that sharp-eyed observer of nineteenth-century America, was particularly interested in what impact egalitarianism would have on the hierarchies that no society can do without. In such institutions, promotion becomes a problem because of the egalitarian conceit that one man is just as good as another:

. . . As the paths which lead to them are indiscriminately open to all, the progress of all must necessarily be slackened. As the candidates appear to be nearly alike, and as it is difficult to make a selection without infringing the principle of equality, which is the supreme law of democratic societies, the first idea which suggests itself is to make them all advance at the same rate and submit to the same probation. Thus in proportion as men become more alike, and the principle of equality is more peaceably and deeply infused into the institutions and manners of the country, the rules of advancement become more inflexible, advancement itself slower, the difficulty of arriving quickly at a certain height far greater. From hatred of privilege and from the embarrassment of choosing, all men are at last constrained, whatever may be their standard, to pass the same ordeal; all are indiscriminately subjected to a multitude of petty preliminary exercises, in which their youth is wasted and their imagination quenched, so that they despair of ever fully attaining what is held out to them, and when at length they are in a condition to perform any extraordinary acts, the taste for such thing has forsaken them.[5]

As society becomes more imbued by the egalitarian spirit, this mindset seeps into the military, and the superior officer grows more uncomfortable with the idea of making personal, unequivocal statements about the merits of his subordinates. He is freed from “the embarrassment of choosing” by the emergence of anonymous promotion boards and check-the-box requirements that he can easily hide behind: “Well, I couldn’t rate you higher, you see, because you haven’t done a staff tour yet . . .” Thus, egalitarianism leads inevitably to managerialism, a sort of corporate cursus honorum that steeps future leaders in the bureaucratic mindset. In the military, the check-the-box promotion system creates countless roadblocks to the quick rise of geniuses but ensures a mediocre competence at each level, and predictability is in greater demand than brilliance. Such a system tends to produce managers, not leaders, men with eyes focused on the next rung:

. . . In democratic armies, in time of peace, promotion is extremely slow. The officers at first support this state of things with impatience, they grow excited, restless, exasperated, but in the end most of them make up their minds to it. Those who have the largest share of ambition and of resources quit the army; others, adapting their tastes and their desires to their scanty fortunes, ultimately look upon the military profession in a civil point of view. The quality they value most in it is the competency and security which attend it: their whole notion of the future rests upon the certainty of this little provision, and all they require is peaceably to enjoy it.[6]

Men treated like cogs begin to act like cogs. They may be irked now and then by the system but also recognize that being a part of it guarantees their piece of the pie, the “certainty of this little provision.” De Tocqueville’s caveat about all this changing during wartime does not apply to the post-1945 military. There can be no more “boy colonels,” twentysomething prodigies, in a military where minimum time in each rank is required by law.[7] As de Tocqueville remarked, “Thus not only does a long peace fill an army with old men, but it frequently imparts the views of old men to those who are still in the prime of life.”[8]

“So what?” one might ask. Doesn’t the guaranteed competence of a hundred staff officers compensate for an overlooked genius? Although that is debatable, the objection overlooks the fact that the profession of arms is unique. The soldier is not like a plumber or an accountant hired to perform a task. To treat him as such, when there is no “bottom line” to be served in dying for his country, is to conflate the citizen-soldier with the mercenary. Such a thing is dangerous in the long run, for since ancient times, Indo-European societies have recognized that the warrior class has the power to utterly subdue society. The unique capabilities of the warrior class make it imperative that its ethos center around self-sacrifice for the good of the people. Hence the social significance behind the Germanic warrior-god Tyr and the legendary Roman hero Mucius Scaevola, who willingly gave up their sword-hands to save their people.[9]This ethos must also include a chivalric spirit, otherwise soldiers risk becoming sociopaths, and killing becomes like cleaning a clogged drain. Yet managerialism, by depriving its servants of historical continuity, giving them supervisors instead of leaders, and replacing the warrior’s ethos with verbiage from the corporate world, sooner or later delivers them over to just such a fate. Men cannot attain glory if they cannot conceive of it.

An Army of Hoopers

De Tocqueville warned that in an egalitarian society, it becomes all the more important to immerse the intellect in the great works of aristocratic ages.[10] Yet already, he noticed, there was a tendency to abandon the ancient works in favor of books that treated the individual as the victim of anonymous social forces that he was powerless to counteract:

In reading the historians of aristocratic ages, and especially those of antiquity, it would seem that, to be master of his lot, and to govern his fellow creatures, man requires only to be master of himself. In perusing the historical volumes which our age has produced, it would seem that man is utterly powerless over himself and over all around him. The historians of antiquity taught how to command: those of our time teach only how to obey . . . If this doctrine of necessity . . . passes from authors to their readers, till it infects the whole mass of the community and gets possession of the public mind, it will soon paralyse the activity of modern society, and reduce Christians to the level of Turks.[11]

As early as the 1870s, a growing trend in the officer corps was to take one’s cues from industry, which seemed so efficient and provided the fighting man with such wonderful technology. Alfred Thayer Mahan, naval officer and future author of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, observed that in an officer’s education, the humanities were being gradually replaced by study of the “physical and mechanical sciences, and an intimate acquaintance with the arts of the manufacturer.” Proponents of the managerialist approach argued that the officer’s academic grounding should be principally in these cutting-edge fields, else he “must descend from the high position occupied by him and his predecessors for these centuries past and become the simple drudge of others whose minds have received a more vigorous and deeper, though often narrower, culture.” Mahan retorted that the attempt to join officership with technical expertise “has upon the whole been a failure, except where it has succeeded in reducing both to mediocrity in the individual.”[12] The technocratic approach tended to create managers, not leaders, to “impede the growth of the class of moral powers needed at sea; to promote caution unduly; to substitute calculation for judgment; to create trust in formulas rather than in one’s self.”[13]So much for men with empires in their purpose and new eras in their brains.

Countering the push for technocratic specialization, Mahan argued for an education grounded in English literature, foreign languages (to a fluency allowing the acquisition of their literature), and naval tactics:

If I be asked . . . how the English studies or the acquirements of Foreign Languages help a man to handle and fight his ship, I will reply that a taste for these two pursuits tends to give breadth of thought and loftiness of spirit; the English directly, the Foreign Languages by opening their literature. The ennobling effect of such pursuits upon the sentiment and intellect of the seaman helps, I think, to develop a generous pride, a devotion to lofty ideals, which cannot fail to have a beneficial effect upon a profession which possesses, and in its past history has illustrated in a high degree, many of the elements of heroism and grandeur. The necessarily materialistic character of mechanical science tends rather to narrowness and low ideals.[14]

Needless to say, Mahan’s recommendations did not win out, and in the decades that followed, the managerialist faction grew in strength. From industry and engineering the new officer-technocrats imported a reliance on procedures, grafted it onto remnants of classic military leadership, and comforted themselves with the maxim, “We lead people, but manage things.” Lacking the independent spirit Mahan extolled, the new breed of officers was risk-averse, preferring to shelve decisions whenever possible until committees could be formed. If this was not possible, they could at least hope to hide behind procedures, and this created an incentive to make everything more systematic and routine, even the higher aspects of leading men. Since there was less need for the individual judgment of the officer, it became easier to simply plug in mediocre men – and mediocrity is exactly what all this produces. Brilliance and dashing spirit became increasingly hard to find, but at least the ship wouldn’t sink. Junior officers, who once occupied Olympian heights, came to resemble highly-paid enlisted members, and today even senior officers are as subject to rote procedures and possess as little scope for lofty ambition as the most junior technician repairing a generator.

By the Second World War, officers like Hooper in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited were as common as hobbits in the shire:

Hooper had no illusions about the Army – or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe. . . . Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry . . . Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales and Marathon – these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

. . . He had an overmastering regard for efficiency and, drawing on his modest commercial experience, he would sometimes say of the ways of the Army . . .  “They couldn’t get away with that in business.”[15]

As indeed they could not, a fact which the post-1945 military was eager to solve. President Eisenhower warned in vain against the military-industrial complex, for the senior levels of the officer corps blended seamlessly with the corporate world and appropriated its outlook, methods, and language.[16] One day, Robert McNamara was president of Ford Motor Co.; the next, he was Secretary of Defense, and this “IBM machine with legs” brought in teams of management specialists to accelerate the corporatization of the military.[17] A statistician by training, McNamara had an enduring effect on the military that went far beyond the debacle in Vietnam. Bombing targets for the sake of improving the numbers, fudging statistics by re-defining the parameters, and grossly overestimating enemy casualties (while minimizing or ignoring civilian ones) are all familiar to those who have participated in the recent crop of Middle Eastern wars.

The managerial obsession with statistical models and measures of effectiveness has taken over the officer corps like a parasite its host. As de Tocqueville observed, the egalitarian impulse gives rise to a structuring of promotion in which box-checking has more weight than merit – especially if that merit can’t be quantified, in which case it is useless. Officer and enlisted alike must essentially write their own annual performance reports for their superiors to review, edit, and sign, supplying grandiose bullet-statements that they hope will curry favor with promotion boards. Each service has Websites where one can shop around for winning bullets, and it is all too common to find someone painstakingly crafting a bullet while they do the task the bullet is for.[18]The dollar value alone of all the exaggerated financial impacts in these bullet statements would probably exceed the world’s entire GDP. Thirty billion dollars appears on one of my more successful performance reports.

By the 1990s, with variations among the services, there was little to distinguish the ranks of officers and senior NCOs from the corporate world. The Air Force issued a “Little Blue Book” of its core values, with these inspiring words: “We must focus on providing services and generating products that fully respond to customer wants and anticipate customer needs . . .” It explained one of its core values thusly: “Excellence in all we do demands that we aggressively implement policies to ensure the best possible cradle-to-grave management of resources.”[19] As if sensing that they went too far, since 9/11 the managerialists have added more rhetoric about the “warfighter” and stock phrases such as “we [insert any career field here] are the tip of the spear.” Yet underneath it all is the same corporate babble from the cramped imaginations and mediocre minds that Mahan warned against.

For all the vaunted talk of asymmetric warfare, paradigm shifts, and thinking outside the box, our military remains one of the most symmetrical, predictable forces in the world. This has nothing to with the soldier on the ground or the sailor pounding the deckplates, but with the functionaries who pose as their leaders. And yet this is not the worst of it.

“A military that looks like the nation it serves”

The military managerialists, firmly ensconced by the end of the Second World War, set about transforming this ancient hierarchy into something worthier of a triumphant democracy. The wartime indoctrination in democratic values continued, as the military’s mission was recast from defending America’s borders to defending “freedom and democracy around the world,” as the Sailor’s Creed puts it.[20]The military became a kind of social laboratory for egalitarianism, and it is by means of this that the elite convinces itself that it truly deserves its place at the top.

Long before the struggle over desegregating schools and the bussing fight, President Truman (himself once an Army officer) ended centuries of racial segregation in the military with an executive order. He thereby demonstrated how easy it is to effect socially controversial changes in the military, since government can silence any opposition through threats of courts-martial and dishonorable discharges. The ostensibly successful integration of groups X and Y in the military can then be used as another argument to overcome recalcitrant sectors of broader society. Another advantage of social engineering via the military is that its members, after being indoctrinated in the new order of things, re-enter the civilian world, thus increasing the number of citizens for whom such issues don’t really matter. Since the draft ended in 1973, nearly half of recruits (now serving for longer terms) have come from rural areas, which are overwhelmingly conservative on social issues, making this indoctrinate-and-return method even more effective.[21]

In the decades since, enacting controversial change through decree has become something of an art form in the modern military. In 2011, I attended a briefing where my unit was informed that for the first time in its history, the US military would allow individuals to openly serve as homosexuals, ending the policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” similarly decreed from on high back in 1994. On these occasions, each service tries to have the new policy announced by someone of sufficient rank to overawe those present – preferably a General or Admiral, but in a pinch a full-bird Colonel or Naval Captain will suffice. Next, the senior officer will make sure that everyone present understands that the change is a fait accompli, that to oppose it would be at best pointless and at worst punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. All that remains, then, is to work out the details, which in fact are anything but. Nothing demonstrates the irresponsibility of the managerialists more than the way they shrug off the complex problems that arise from radically changing the relationships of those who must live, work, and fight together.

Finally, the briefing officer will announce that while he or she will field questions, no discussion involving morality will be allowed. Those in attendance comply without a murmur. After all, what would be the point of debating the morality of an inevitable change? To bemoan growing old is common enough; to debate whether it is ethical is a waste of time. Hence the non-stop effort by our elites to convince us that the transformation of our society through mass immigration is inevitable: once that point is conceded, there is little point in arguing that it is undesirable.

The same technique was used for the opening of all combat positions to women, then the order allowing transgendered individuals.[22] (The Trump administration has not completely undone the transgender policy, since the new wording allows the Pentagon to make exceptions where it sees fit, and the repercussions will be felt for years.[23]) It is not difficult to see why many social conservatives simply get out after one enlistment or never join in the first place. Some of the manliest men don’t find themselves drawn to such a military, where men without chests (as well as women without them) abound.

The move to an all-volunteer force has made it easier, not harder, to tinker with social attitudes in the ranks. For instance, more servicemen see White Nationalism as a greater threat to national security than conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq. More than sixty percent support activating the National Guard or Reserves to handle any future Charlottesville. Of those polled, seventy-six percent were white.[24]

Despite the cuckoldry implied by that last statistic, a military that is eighty-five percent male and sixty percent white – even after great efforts to recruit women and minorities – is a problem in need of solving, according to military leaders.[25] Even though the military already practices affirmative action in recruitment and promotion, it is not enough for some, who advocate doubling down on racial and gender preferences. As one senior female officer puts it, the military will thereby “gain legitimacy from having a military that looks like the nation it serves.”[26] To anyone who has walked around in public recently, having a military that looks like the nation it serves is a horrifying prospect, especially since a large majority of young people are not even qualified for military service.[27] Undaunted, recruiters have reached out directly to “gay community centers,” and there seems to have been a tidal wave of lesbians in the ranks of late. Courtesy of an executive order from President Bush in 2002, the military offers immigrants an expedited route to citizenship if they don a uniform, and over one hundred thousand have joined up.[28] It is shocking how often one encounters servicemen, typically Hispanic but also African, whose English-language skills are so poor that they can barely make themselves understood.

“I will not look at a person and see any race”

A few years ago, the bean-counters at the Pentagon (which now has a high-ranking “diversity chief”) found that the number of blacks in the military had slipped slightly since the 1990s.[29] The generals called for increasing the budget for minority recruitment, even though the percentage of blacks in the military was still greater than their proportion of the civilian population as a whole. The fact that over the past twenty-five years, fewer black youth were interested in military service struck these social engineers as yet another problem to solve. Clearly, what was needed was more diversity and more affirmative action. Marine General James Amos, who created no less than four “diversity task forces” in response, said it was now time to “remove potential barriers for Marines to compete on merit for leadership positions.”[30] There is in fact little pretense that military promotion is based on merit anymore. A white colleague of mine recently managed to make rank in a career field with low promotion rates. His advice? “Don’t check the box marked ‘white’ on your service record. Check ‘other’ and keep them guessing.” For many, however, that is not an option, as most promotion boards review service photos of the candidates.

Another colleague described his experience observing a board that was promoting soldiers to Master Sergeant, the second-highest pay grade in the enlisted ranks. There were about three hundred candidates, but only around fifty would be promoted. First, the board “racked and stacked” all soldiers on merit alone. Then it separated the candidates by race and gender. At a bare minimum, the number of Group X who were to be promoted had to match their percentage in the Army as a whole. Thus, if the Army were twenty percent black, one-fifth of the available slots would go to black candidates, regardless of where they ended up in the general rack-and-stack. If only one soldier happened to be Native American and female, she was guaranteed promotion, even if she came in at last place out of three hundred in the general rating. The idea that soldiers are entitled to have the most qualified people leading them into battle, regardless of race – something that the mid-twentieth century integrators argued – has long since disappeared under affirmative action.

World War II-era recruitment poster

In addition to affirmative action, the military employs subtler tools to suggest a narrowing public space for white males. Bases host cultural events for minority groups, which unit leaders are sure to attend and get photo-ops. Unit walls are festooned with posters for “Hispanic Heritage Month,” “Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month,” and so forth. There are “Profiles in Minority Courage” for every ethnic group except European-Americans, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of those who have served since 1776 come from precisely this group. The typical posters from the Second World War show white men heading into combat, urging the recruit to join and thereby become a man. Their angular faces and determined expressions are well-suited to the descendants of the Viking raiders, Germanic war-bands, and Celtic tribes that carved a path through Europe’s history. Today, not only are the faces hard to find, but equally rare are the exhortations to martial greatness. Themes of racial diversity and delicate gender relations dominate.

               

Consider a typical modern poster, this one from the Navy. Three sailors stare accusingly at the viewer: one is a black male, another a white female, the third an Asian male. There is no white male to be found, but his existence is suggested by the words below: “No sailor stands watch alone – so we reported that guy who wouldn’t leave our shipmate alone.” Another poster proclaims the “Army Values,” with six soldiers arrayed in a kind of wedge formation that has the front soldier – a black male, staring at the viewer with an accusing eye – taking up nearly half of the poster space. Second in position and size is a white female, then a Hispanic male, and so forth. Only one of the six soldiers, toward the back, is recognizably an Anglo male. So it is with the lion’s share of these corporate warrior posters: They emphasize diversity so much that one could be forgiven for thinking white males were statistically insignificant in the ranks, not the largest group. And there is always this accusing stare from the minority serviceman or woman, shaming the viewer, demanding that he adjust to this new reality. To get a feel for this in-your-face diversity, watch this unwittingly humorous video, part of mandatory training.

Air Force NCOs have a creed with this curious promise: “I will not look at a person and see any race, creed, color, religion, sex, age, or national origin, for I will only see the person; nor will I ever show prejudice or bias.”[31] Curious, because the Air Force, like all branches, engages in a kind of doublethink about these things: no conscious recognition of race or sex, alongside a fierce determination to get more women and minorities into positions of authority. It should come as no surprise to learn that all this focus on minority recruitment and promotion has increased racial tensions in the military (in the above-mentioned poll about national security threats, five percent left comments complaining that Black Lives Matter wasn’t an option).[32] But of course, that is just further proof to the progressive managerialists that they are on the right track, that it is just a matter of removing the remaining undesirables who question the new order.

“Weak men and disorderly women”

De Tocqueville writes:

There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make of man and woman beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things – their occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may readily be conceived, that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded; and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.[33]

The Frenchman went on to praise the state of affairs in early nineteenth-century America, in which men and women had completely different spheres but were each held in high regard:

In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes . . . but in two pathways which are always different. American women never manage the outward concerns of the family, or conduct a business, or take a part in political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labour of the fields, or to make any of those laborious exertions which demand the exercise of physical strength.[34]

The nation that de Tocqueville describes, in which “it is not the practice for a guilty wife to clamour for the rights of women, whilst she is trampling on her holiest duties,” has vanished without a trace.[35] Since time immemorial, one of the most basic truths of human existence is that no tribe can survive if it fails to perform two functions: defending itself from enemies and bearing children who can continue the line. If the community should neglect either of these tasks, it can be destroyed in a single generation. Men and women are each designed by nature to perform one of these two essential tasks. In Sparta, the only marked graves were reserved for men who had died in combat and women who had died in childbirth, since both had died in service to the community.[36]

It should come as no surprise, then, to find that the iron resolve to get more women in the military should be accompanied by a shameful weakening of masculinity, for such a disordered society must expect that it will have more “weak men and disorderly women.” Case in point: Two years ago, two US Navy boats were captured by the Iranian Navy. During their comfortable fifteen-hour captivity, the ranking American officer on scene took it upon himself to publicly apologize to the Iranians, while some of his men broke down crying, which the Iranians – not raised on a diet of sensitivity briefs – were only too happy to film.[37] We shouldn’t judge them too harshly. After all, their service’s professional creed ends with these rousing words of military glory, “I am committed to excellence and the fair treatment of all.”[38]

Racial diversity does not pose such a direct threat to the prime function of men in the tribe. One could argue that it does so indirectly, since white males are being slowly decoupled from their original corporate responsibility for America’s defense, attended by a vanishing of any notion of tribe, or nation. But the pursuit of gender diversity corrodes the military’s fighting spirit far more than the effort to get more Samoans in uniform. The opening of all combat positions to women in 2015 was not the mere presidential whim of Barack Obama; it was the outcome of decades of feminist propaganda movies and progressive messaging in the media. For years, we’ve been listening to stories of the most patriotic, competent females contrasted with bumbling, hidebound males who can’t handle a successful woman in leadership.

The reality is that the effort to get females in key positions both in combat and leadership has resulted in a downgrading of objective standards across the board. For example, male soldiers aged 17-21 must perform a minimum of 42 pushups in two minutes; female soldiers need only perform 19. Male soldiers must run two miles in at least 15:54; female soldiers can skate by with 18:54.[39]It would be absurd, then, to claim that male and female soldiers are equally capable of carrying each other out of harm’s way, or indeed performing any of the myriad tasks that require strength and endurance from the soldier. Realizing this hypocrisy, the Marine Corps experimented with a “gender-neutral” fitness test in 2016. In the event, eighty-six percent of female recruits failed it; less than three percent of males did.[40] Some female servicemembers will even acknowledge the absurdity of two different sets of minimum physical standards.[41] Yet here is a clear-cut conflict between equality and diversity.

When the Secretary of the Navy announced to the graduating class at Annapolis that the Navy and the Marine Corps needed to increase the number of female recruits from seven percent to at least twenty-five percent of the total, he was making it all but impossible to enforce the same standards on women as on men. Humorously enough, his justification was that “a more diverse force is a stronger force.”[42] We have finally concocted “so preposterous a medley of the works of nature” that diversity has become a greater metric of strength than actual physical strength. How exactly a military is stronger by being physically weaker, racially and religiously divided, and devoid of a coherent identity is something he never answered. Presumably the victims of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan might be more critical of such a hell-bent effort to produce diversity in the ranks.[43]

Then there is the mountain of problems created by having men and women serving in the closest possible quarters. During a combat deployment to the Middle East, my unit had three females. One accused a soldier of raping her; another, a married woman with children, was having an affair with a married serviceman; and a third, single, was sleeping with a married soldier whose wife back home found out during the deployment. All this drama was going on while we were supposed to be focused on the mission. In fact, it seems that the more stressful the situation, the closer to combat, the more inhibitions melt away and the soap opera begins. Such situations help explain why military wives have the most reservations about their husbands serving with women.

But as in broader society, the problems created by diversity in the military also cement the need for a managerial elite to preside over these conflicts, studiously review the data, and apply the appropriate remedies. In 2017, the “Marines United” scandal erupted, in which Marines were caught sharing sexually explicit pictures of female servicemembers in an online group that had thirty thousand members. After convening a slew of disciplinary boards, the Marine Corps is now using the incident to dramatically expand its monitoring of social media.[44] Faced with such situations, the managerialists argue that every scandal is further proof of the need for more women in the military:

The dearth of women in leadership roles is not just an optics problem. It undermines effectiveness, inhibiting the recruitment and retention of talented women who are repulsed by a male-dominated culture. General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has himself identified the vast gender disparity in command positions as a key cause of the sexual-assault crisis: “I believe it’s because we’ve had separate classes of military personnel, at some level.”[45]

Unit notice boards are buried under various “zero tolerance” warnings pertaining to inappropriate male-female interactions. Each unit is saddled with having an NCO appointed as the Sexual Assault Response Coordinator, who then must administer a vigorous program of mandatory training for the unit as a whole. Much of this training consists of ridiculous vignettes that hammer home the “perception is reality” mantra that governs accusations of sexual harassment. In recent years, the training program has entailed breaking up the unit into smaller groups of ten or twelve, in which servicemen must act out the scenarios, successfully parrot the party line, and even share examples of which they know before they can be let go. To be present at one of these Cultural Revolution-type “struggle sessions” is to witness the emasculation of our military before your eyes.

The military is also subjected to periodic surveys with questionable methodologies as to the “command climate” in the unit. If the number of reported sexual assaults goes up, then clearly we need more HR training, even though a rapist is not going to be deterred by a training video any more than a psychopath would by a gun law. If the number of reported sexual assaults goes down, it obviously means that victims don’t feel comfortable coming forward, so clearly we need more HR training. Those who are dumbfounded at why increasing the number of women in the military increases the number of sexual problems it must face are fools, pure and simple. Those who respond to such problems by increasing the number of women, expanding affirmative action, and multiplying sensitivity workshops without end are deliberately weakening what remains of this country’s fighting abilities. When a Navy pilot had the audacity to draw a phallus with his aircraft’s contrails in the sky, the joke sent the HR goons into Def Con 1, and the Navy had a “stand-down” day for more training and penitent beating of chests.[46]

The focus on indoctrination reduces the time for training on professional skills, a problem that can have fatal consequences even in peacetime. In 2017, a spate of entirely avoidable accidents by the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet resulted in the deaths of more servicemen than died in Afghanistan that same year.[47] The official explanation was an exhausting deployment tempo and high demands on crews, with no explanation of how previous generations of sailors, slogging through the Second World War and the Cold War, were able to avoid such frequent crashing into friendly vessels.[48]Many experts point to the declining amount of training time devoted to basic seamanship skills, but few have the courage to admit what has crowded out those classes: relentless training on tolerance, sensitivity, and “awareness” of an increasing array of protected groups. Unit commands put the highest priority on these classes and demand one hundred percent attendance, for fear of getting the blame should any HR incidents happen under their watch. True, there are some hopeful signs, such as the Army’s recent ending of transgender training in favor of training that actually builds combat effectiveness.[49] Time will tell, but one thing is certain: The inevitable friction that diversity brings will invite more task forces, more training, and more boxes to check.

The Coming American

Alexis de Tocqueville worried that the love of equality would lead Americans to a soft tyranny, one that

covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.[50]

A nation can survive fairly long with citizens such as these, provided that an altogether different spirit animates its armies. But it does not bode well if its warriors also begin to resemble “a flock of timid and industrious animals,” gelded by the shepherd government in order to make them more docile and accepting of this grand social experiment.

To succeed, the advocates for egalitarianism must ultimately overturn biology in at least two ways. First, they need to achieve the kind of blunt, matter-of-fact relationship between the sexes portrayed in so many action movies, in which men are just soldiers who have one extra piece of equipment to carry. Those charged with conducting “resistance” training, in which future pilots, special forces, and other personnel are treated as POWs and subjected to minor torture, know that nothing is more effective than making a male soldier listen to a woman in distress. Yet as more women move closer to the front lines, more of them are in danger of falling into enemy hands. So if the male protective instinct becomes a liability, far better to get rid of it, or at least train men that their instincts are wrong.

Secondly, they need the white male to fully accept that while the achievements of others will bring public credit to their sex, race, and ethnic group, his achievements will only bring credit to an idea so nebulous that any newly-arrived immigrant may claim it as his own. The same pride in tribe and ethnos that is allowed and even encouraged for every minority group will be immediately condemned in him.

The managerialists are confident they can achieve these goals, but even their wildest hopes are tinged by resignation, for most of them are, after all, white males. Perhaps they console themselves with the thought that their own retirement is assured: après moi, le deluge. Their task will be complete only when the last white male among them displays a Powerpoint slideshow on why his presence is undesirable. Even if this social experiment results in the collapse of America’s fighting forces before a determined enemy, far better to go out with their egalitarian conscience intact. So what if a sailor bawls at the first sign of hostility, or a soldier lacks the tenacity to crush the enemy? At least they will be fully versed on the relative benefits of restricted versus unrestricted reporting for sexual assault allegations.

What will this coming American look like? Nothing like what the poet hoped for, of that I am sure:

Bring me men to match my mountains,

Bring me men to match my plains,

Men with empires in their purpose,

And new eras in their brains.

We who once thrilled to those words will soon be gone, like the words themselves, sandblasted off the stone. Forced into retirement, I had not the heart for a ceremony, to participate in such a charade. What would I say?

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.[51]

                                   Notes

[1] Sam Walter Foss, “The Coming American.”

[2]James A. Shaw, “AF Academy renames ‘Bring Me Men’ ramp.”

[3] Robert Knowles & Rachel E. Vandlandingham, “Affirmative, Sir! (And Ma’am!),” The New Republic, June 24, 2013.

[4] Eric Bradner, “U.S. military opens combat positions to women,” CNN, December 3, 2015; Jonah Engel Bromwich, “How U.S. Military Policy on Transgender Personnel Changed under Obama,” New York Times online, July 26, 2017.

[5] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2002), p. 574.

[6] De Tocqueville, pp. 597-598.

[7] Stew Smith, “Military Commissioned Officer Promotions,” The Balance Careers, March 5, 2018.

[8] De Tocqueville, p. 598.

[9] For an excellent discussion of this in conjunction with the mythology of the Germanic warrior god Tyr, see Woden’s Folk Kindred, Heathen Handbook (2012), pp. 104-107.

[10] De Tocqueville, p. 438.

[11] De Tocqueville, pp. 457-458.

[12] Commander Alfred Thayer Mahan, “Naval Education,” U.S. Naval InstituteProceedings, vol. 5, 1879, pp. 347, 353.

[13] Mahan, p. 347.

[14] Mahan, p. 352.

[15] Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited(New York: Back Bay Books, 2012), pp. 9-10.

[16] “Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation.”

[17] Stephen Braun, “Robert S. McNamara dies at 93; architect of the Vietnam War,” LA Times online, July 7, 2009.

[18] For example: Air Force (http://www.eprbullets.com/, http://www.afeprbullets.com/ ), Army (http://www.armywriter.com/ncoer_bullets.htm), Navy (http://www.navyfitrep.com/officer.html).

[19] United States Air Force Core Values, January 1, 1997.

[20] US Navy, “The Sailor’s Creed.”

[21] Bernard Rostker, “The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force,” Rand Corporation research brief, 2006; Ann Scott Tyson, “Youths in Rural U.S. Are Drawn to Military,” Washington Post online, November 4, 2005.

[22] Bradner, ibid.; Bromwich, ibid.

[23] Helene Cooper & Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Trump Approves New Limits on Transgender Troops in the Military,” New York Times online, March 24, 2018.

[24] Leo Shane III, “One in four troops sees white nationalism in the ranks,” Military Times online, October 23, 2017.

[25] Kim Parker, Anthony Cilluffo, & Renee Stepler, “6 facts about the U.S. military and its changing demographics,” Fact Tank: News in the Numbers, April 13, 2017.

[26] Knowles & Vandlandingham, ibid.

[27] Thomas Spoehr & Bridget Handy, “The Looming National Security Crisis: Young Americans Unable to Serve in the Military,” Heritage Foundation report, February 13, 2018.

[28] Elisabeth Bumiller, “Marines Hit the Ground Running in Seeking Recruits at Gay Center,” New York Times online, September 20, 2011.

[29] Gregg Zoroya, “Military backslides on ethnic diversity,” USA Today online, February 17, 2014.

[30] Zoroya, ibid.

[31] “Air Force NCO Creed.”

[32] Shane, ibid.

[33] De Tocqueville, pp. 547-548.

[34] De Tocqueville, p. 548.

[35] De Tocqueville, p. 549.

[36] Plutarch, “Life of Lycurgus,” in Plutarch on Sparta (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 39.

[37] Kellan Howell, “Lt. David Nartker, 27, identified as Navy sailor who apologized in Iran video,” The Washington Times online, January 15, 2016; Adam Taylor, “New video from Iranian state television shows captured U.S. sailor crying,” The Washington Post online, February 10, 2016.

[38] “The Sailor’s Creed.”

[39] US Army Basic, “APFT Standards.”

[40] Lolita C. Baldor, “New Standards Weeding Out Both Male and Female Marine Combat Hopefuls,” Military.com, 2018.

[41] Kate Germano, “Make the Standards for Male and Female Marines Equal,” The New York Times online, August 20, 2015.

[42] Derrick Perkins, “Mabus: 1 in 4 Marine recruits should be women,” Marine Corps Times online, May 26, 2015.

[43] Associated Press, “Fort Hood shooting rampage suspect: U.S. at war with Islam,” CBS News, July 27, 2013.

[44] Shawn Snow, “Seven Marines court-martialed in wake of Marines United scandal,” Marine Corps Times online, March 1, 2018.

[45] Knowles & Vandlandingham, ibid.

[46] Dave Brooks, “Navy apologizes after pilot uses plane to draw sky penis,” The Daily Caller, November 17, 2017.

[47] Statista, “Number of fatalities among Western coalition soldiers involved in the execution of Operation Enduring Freedom from 2001 to 2018“; Alex Horton & Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Deadly Navy accidents in the Pacific raise questions over a force stretched too thin,” The Washington Post online, August 26, 2017.

[48] Horton & Gibbons-Neff, ibid.

[49] Even so, the training is being ended not because it is worthless but because “[t]ransgender training is complete across the Total Army.” Carlo Muñoz, “Army training will now focus on actual battlefield skills, not social issues,” The Washington Times online, June 25, 2018.

[50] De Tocqueville, pp. 627-628.

[51] Wikipedia, “Tears in rain monologue.”