We Are Living In Perilous Times

I think the most under-reported news story of the past week is that of top military leaders slipping the leash of civilian control of the military; and more specifically, the decision to ignore the commands of the Commander-in-Chief. As I noted the other day, two influential retired generals, Jim Mattis and John Allen penned two very public messages to current military commanders to ignore Trump's orders regarding what Maxine Waters described as insurrection, and what the protesters are now calling a revolution. Michael Hayden, the retired Air Force general who has directed both the National Security Agency and the CIA, joined in, as have Gen. Tony Thomas, the former head of U.S. Special Operations Command, retired Adm. Mike Mullen, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, another former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; retired Gen. Martin Dempsey, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Barack Obama, retired Adm. William McRaven, former commander of US Special Operations Command under Obama, retired Adm. James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, retired Army Gen. Raymond A. "Tony" Thomas, former commander of US Special Operations Command under Obama and Trump, Paul D. Eaton, a retired major general and veteran of the Iraq War, who now serves as a senior adviser at VoteVets.org, and retired Gen. Colin Powell.

     Although most of their comments were ostensibly directed to American citizens, it was clear that the real message was to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, and, secondarily, to Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper. I'm sure that the underlying threat to Milley, who is turning 62, is that he won't get a cushy post-retirement job working for a defense contractor that would turn him into a multi-millionaire. The consequence was to prevent the President from invoking the Insurrection Act by making it clear that the military would not obey his commands. The New York Times noted that:

On Wednesday, Milley released his own letter that forcefully reminded the troops that their military is supposed to protect the right to freedom of speech. He added a handwritten codicil to his letter, some of it straying outside the margins: “We all committed our lives to the idea that is America — We will stay true to that oath and the American people.”

A de facto order to disobey the Commander-in-Chief. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted:

In remarks on Wednesday, Esper, a former Army officer and defense lobbyist, voiced support for protesters’ outraged by the killing of George Floyd, a black man killed in police custody on May 25, and said he did not think it was necessary to invoke the Insurrection Act, as Trump threatened early in the week if governors did not take sufficient actions to quash unrest in their states.

Esper subsequently ordered active military troops called to Washington D.C. to quell rioters to be sent home, and national guard troops brought to Washington D.C. were disarmed. Thus, we saw the National Guard troops being sworn in as deputy federal marshals under the control of the Justice Department. I recognize that this is not unusual--National Guard troops deployed for crowd control, such as presidential inaugurations, are also sworn in--but it underlines the fact that the DoD, which had no problem deploying armed members of the 82nd Airborne to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to quell looting, refused to do so in this instance merely because they don't like the current president. In short, the military chose sides.

      Some of you may disagree with this characterization, and argue that, instead, the military was trying to maintain its neutrality. But it isn't the military's role to make policy, which is what they did in this case by not supporting the President and taking away one of his options to deal with violent rioters and looting. As this article at Defense One explains:

     ...civilian control of the military is considered a bedrock principle of the U.S. form of government, explained Mara Karlin, a former Pentagon official who now directs strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Karlin said that system “is predicated on the notion that military leaders give advice but ultimately, civilians will be looking across a wide range of policy and political issues to make decisions on the use of force.” U.S. conviction in that system grows in part out of the nation’s founding: One of the key grievances by the authors of the Declaration of Independence was that King George III “has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”

      Given that fundamental principle, the choice of so many former senior officers to speak publicly on the decisions of the civilian commander in chief is remarkable. 

      “If this isn’t a civil-military relations crisis, I don’t know what is,” Karlin said. “I think it’s really important that folks appreciate the magnitude and the character of what’s happening right now and recognize that we’ll be living with the baggage for a while now.” 

Although the military has ignored orders of duly elected presidents before, this is the most public instance, and demonstrates that military is also setting itself up as a form of Praetorian guard.

      Others of you may view this as a positive development reasoning that if the shoe were on the other foot--i.e., a leftist president seeking to use the military against conservatives--it demonstrates that the military would choose to not follow through with such orders. That is an overly rosy view of the situation. The fact is that these former and current generals acknowledge the leftist point that the United States suffers from structural racism that favors whites, and most of them have publicly stated that "white nationalists"--not Islamic terrorists, communist China, or other entities and groups--pose the greatest threat to national security. Now, keep in mind that according to the left, "just because you may not be racist does not mean that you are not complicit or engaged in upholding the benefits and privileges given as a result of systemic racism," but you must bow your knee and pledge your allegiance to the left, such as this group of FBI agents recently did.

     This is not a metaphorical action. While I don't agree with everything in his article, Joshua Mitchell, writing at Providence Magazine, explains that what we are seeing with the Black Lives Matter movement is a form of neo-paganism:

       The pagan world was the world of many gods, each associated with a people who made payments and sacrifices to their gods. Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract that when pagan nations battled other pagan nations, soldiers did not battle soldiers; rather, gods battled gods. Hence, the cathartic rage of pagan wars.

       Christianity toppled the pagan world. The cathartic rage of war, Christians argued, in which one nation purged another, could not solve the problem of man’s stain, .... What this means is that blood rage cannot expiate stain; the sins of my people can no longer be purged by cathartic rage toward your people, and vice versa. That is why Rousseau concluded that Christianity had ruined politics, and had produced a civilization of pacifists, whose rage toward other nations could not be enkindled for the purpose of war. If you doubt this, ponder the fact that Christianity developed a “doctrine of just war,” according to which cathartic rage could not be reason enough to go to war.

But leftist racial politics is pagan:

       What if we do not live in a liberal world that Christianity makes possible? What if, under the pretext of liberalism and Christianity, America is still pagan? That is, what if America has always been a white nation, and still is? This is the position of many on the American left today. It is a position that holds that the black man, George Floyd, and the white police officer responsible for his death, are representatives of blood nations, not singular persons. The murder of one by the other is representative of the collective murder of one people by the other. American law cannot bring about justice, because each blood nation has its own justice, from which marginalized blood nations can never benefit. American law is white law. Street vengeance, therefore, is the only recourse—whether we call them protests or riots. White people must die, as a just exchange for the black people who have died.

      This pagan view certainly informs many analyses of America. What is striking, however, is that intermixed with this view is also a Christian claim that each individual person who is a member of the transgressive people should feel deep personal guilt about what has happened. In a purely pagan world, this would be unthinkable. Once a blood sacrifice was made, the score would be settled. In America today, there are some who are scoring accounts in this way; but what has been most remarkable about the aftermath of George Floyd’s death has been the mix of pagan blood accounting and Christian guilt, which has taken the from of a kind of racial contrition, in which apologies are offered to members of the black nation by whites for their complicity in murder, because they are members of a white nation. This intermixed pagan and Christian logic is what we are seeing play out in America today: persons who, on liberal grounds, are not guilty of a crime, confess their guilty complicity in the crime that through their proxy, a white policeman, they have committed.

Or, as Z-Man explains:

       This cult we are seeing evolve in the empire is much more like the Cult of Reason, in that it has no gods and elevates abstract concepts like inclusion, diversity, cooperation and openness. When activist chant demands for justice, for example, they are not talking about legal justice or even moral justice. Justice is one of the many words to signify this collection of concepts at the center of the cult.... To the insider, a cult is a world where the internal rules and beliefs of the cult perfectly explain the world. To the outsider, the rules and beliefs of the cult seem amusing, bizarre or possibly dangerous. That’s what is happening in the empire. Most of us are outside this ruling class cult, so their chants, declarations and actions strike as strange and crazy. The destruction of the cities makes no sense. For the cult, these riots are purifying rituals. To outsiders, they are wanton destruction.

      This may also explain the bizarre behavior over the Covid virus. It was obvious a long time ago that something other than science and a concern for public health was driving public officials to stoke the panic. The elaborate game of make believe has now been made plain. People are barred from Christian services, but BLM protests and homosexual parades are now permitted. The destruction of civil society from the top down was the elite’s version of the urban street riots.

      What we may be seeing is this weird religion of inclusion and cooperation quickly morph into a suicide cult that seeks to level existing society. First the elites try to destroy society with the lock downs and elimination of personal freedom. Now the rank and file are doing their part by devastating the cities. The new faith will not rest until every trace of the old has been erased. That includes the people. Those who represent the old, with their white habits and white ideas must be destroyed.

Consequently, it is only a short jump from being "not racist" to being a "white nationalist" in the eyes of the left, and thus a legitimate target of military force. And the military that places its highest priority in other sacraments of the left, such as incorporating women into combat roles, celebrating homosexuals and transsexuals, requiring troops to march in high-heeled shoes, and persecuting Christians in its ranks, will not hesitate at crushing the enemy "white nation" with all the hatred that can come from their religious zealotry.