tR Live: Episode 6

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week’s news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

The Reality Principle

No one was more important than Herbert Marcuse to the effort to inject Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the Boomer generation.  His book Eros and Civilization, which became the Left’s bible in the 1960s, argued for replacing the “reality principle” with the “pleasure principle”.  The result, Marcuse promised, would be a world of all play and no work.

The actual result has been a culture of instant gratification and with it the growing social pathologies now engulfing us.  If we want to reverse America’s decline, we must again enthrone the reality principle.  The reality principle says that to succeed, our actions must be based on reality, on conditions as they are and not as we might like them to be.  This is especially urgent in five areas, where the relativities are:

• State capitalism is failing.  State capitalism is capitalism where cozy relationships between business and government change the basis for a company’s success from building a better product at a lower price to getting special deals from government.  Also known as “rent seeking”, state capitalism leads to ever-larger and more powerful corporate entities because the bigger a company is, the more money it has to give to politicians, and the more money it gives to politicians the less appetite the government has to rein in bad corporate behavior.  State capitalism leads to a society with a tiny, super-wealthy elite and an even-poorer middle class.  This is what the “yellow vests” in France are protesting, in what I think is only the beginning of a powerful political movement.  There is an alternative to state capitalism: not socialism, which impoverishes everyone, but a regulated market that has strict limits on scale.  Most finance, production, and consumption should be local.
• America’s grasp for world hegemony has already failed.  After the end of the Cold War, instead of bringing our troops home and minding our own business, the foreign policy elite and the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex (the MIC) attempted to make America the only superpower, “the universal monarchy” as it used to be known when Hapsburg Spain tried the same thing.  The result for both countries was mountains of debt, military failure, and economic decline.  (The best book on Spain’s experience is J.H. Elliott’s The Count-Duke of Olivares; the parallels are striking).  We have ended up force-feeding the flames of Fourth Generation war, war our military does not know how to fight, putting the whole state system at risk, and spurring massive invasions of Europe and North America by barbarians from the global south.  There is a plausible alternative:  America First, which means bringing our legions home and using them to man the limes, as President Trump is trying to do while the MIC works to block him.
• The civil rights movement has proven to be a false road for America’s blacks.  While it has allowed some blacks to integrate into the middle class, it has left a large residue in urban ghettos where they have essentially been written off.  Overrun by crime, drugs, illegitimacy, and welfare dependence, America’s urban black neighborhoods, too many of them, are factories of disorder, something no state can tolerate indefinitely without risking its own legitimacy.  In the hands of America’s current black “leaders”, civil rights has come to mean little more than endless demands for more handouts.  The promising alternative is the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, who argued that instead of saying “We’re victims, do something for us,” blacks should show by their own efforts that they can perform at the same level as whites.  I’m willing to bet they can.  If not, well, then they are not equal, and future policy will have to be based on that reality.
• Feminism has been a disaster for most women.  While it has benefitted a small elite in business and politics, feminism, with its demand for no-fault divorce, destroyed what most women depend on for lifetime security, marriage.  Men do better on their own than women, and the Boomer generation’s women find themselves, too often, alone, poor, and without a future as they get older.  Feminism’s pretense that men and women are interchangeable has led to growing dysfunction in more and more areas, as women are soldiers, cops, firemen, etc.  Can’t do the job but also can’t be let go.  The #MeToo movement is leaving young men afraid to approach women, which is building enormous anger in men cut off from sex.  When women get angry, they squawk.  When men get angry, they kill.  For both sexes, the alternative we know works is the Victorian doctrine of “separate spheres”, where women’s sphere, which Victorians considered the higher one, is home and family while the man brings home the bacon and both can look forward to a comfortable old age in each other’s arms.
• Cultural Marxism has proven greater failure than the old economic Marxism of the Soviet Union.  Both lead to the loss of freedom of thought and expression, but economic Marxism’s shared poverty was more bearable than the isolation and anomie cultural Marxism creates as every natural relationship is perverted and every difference is rubbed raw.  Cultural Marxism makes life in society impossible, which is just what its founders, Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, and Marcuse, wanted it to do.  Their goal was “negation” or “negative dialectics”, more commonly known as nihilism: simply bringing everything down.  Unless we want to live amid the ruins of our civilization, we need to turn to an alternative: retroculture.  Retroculture dismisses all ideologies and says, “We’re going to return to the old ways of doing things in our own lives and the lives of our families.”  As Gertrude Himmelfarb, the preeminent historian of the Victorians, has written, through the Victorian period the incidence of social problems steadily went down, while since the 1960s the incidence of social problems in our society has steadily risen.  There’s a lesson in that.

There are other areas where we need to restore the reality principle; indeed, we need it everywhere if we expect our actions to yield the results we intend.  Acting on any basis other than reality leads to randomness of results, disorder, entropy, and collapse.  It is John Boyd’s “false orientation”.  We’ve been doing it on a massive scale since the 1960s.  In each case, there are reality-based alternatives that could work.  Maybe it’s time for middle class Americans to start putting on those French yellow vests.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

tR Live: Episode 5

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week’s news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

The Marxism That Must Not Be Named

Much to my delight, the New York Times recently published an op-ed, “The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme is 100 Years Old”, written by Yale professor Samuel Moyn, that attacks me and Thomas Hobbes’ novel Victoria (for which I am proud to be agent).  The professor dislikes the book and me because both oppose cultural Marxism, the now-dominant ideology among Western elites that condemns Whites, males, Western culture and the Christian religion as “oppressive”.  But the professor does more than defend cultural Marxism; he writes, “Nothing of the kind actually exists.”

Well, yes, it does.  Cultural Marxism is, as the Times headline indicates, now 100 years old.  Its initial conception goes back to 1919, the year when Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, working independently, concluded that Communism could not be brought about in the West until the Christian religion and Western culture were destroyed.  Gramsci argued that Christianity blinded the working class to its “true” Marxist class interests, while Lukacs, when he was Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, wailed “Who will save us from Western Civilization?”  Lukacs began a program of what he called “cultural terrorism” that included introducing sex education into the Hungarian schools, because he knew that if you could destroy a country’s sexual morals you would take a giant step toward destroying its traditional culture.  

The detailed development of cultural Marxism, which most people now know as “political correctness”, began in 1930 when the Frankfurt School undertook the task.  The Frankfurt School, official known as the Institute for Social Research, was originally to be named the Institute for Marxism.  But its founders, who include Lukacs, decided they could be more effective if they gave it a neutral-sounding name.  That began cultural Marxism’s ongoing practice of concealing its real nature and objectives.  Is that conspiratorial?  What else does the word mean?

Professor Moyn simply denies historical reality.  He writes:

A number of conspiracy theorists tracing the origins of “cultural Marxism” assign outsize significance to the Frankfurt School, an interwar German--and mostly Jewish--intellectual collective of left-wing social theorists and philosophers.  Many members of the Frankfurt School fled Nazism and came to the United States, which is where they supposedly uploaded the virus of cultural Marxism to America.  These zany stories of the Frankfurt School’s role in fomenting political correctness would be entertaining, except that they echo the baseless allegations of tiny cabals ruling the world that fed the right’s paranoid imagination in prior eras.

My answer to the professor (of history no less) is “Read some history.”  The literature on the Frankfurt School is immense and most of it is written by scholars on the Left.  The definitive work is Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School.  Martin Jay is the principal American scholar of the Frankfurt School, and his book The Dialectical Imagination is also quite good, although it ends in 1950 and thus misses most of Herbert Marcuse’s influence.  Lorenz Jager’s recent biography of Theodor Adorno, simply titled Adorno, is excellent.  No open-minded person can read these books and not find in the Frankfurt School’s work the origins of what we now know as political correctness.

If Professor Moyn is too busy to read books--trying to nullify facts by calling them names must take a good deal of thought--I recommend the video documentary “The History of Political Correctness”, which only takes about twenty minutes.  It includes an interview with Martin Jay, then the Chairman of the History Department at Berkeley and no conservative, where Jay says that the Frankfurt School’s product is a version of Marxism and is also a basis of political correctness.  

And if all the volumes of scholarship are not enough, the parallels between Marxism-Leninism and cultural Marxism are obvious:

• Both eliminate freedom of thought and expression and attempt to impose totalitarianism on their suffering subjects, as we see on too many American university campuses.  Stalin’s and Mao’s tyranny was more oppressive than Hitler’s or Mussolini’s and killed far more people, probably at least ten times as many.
• Both see history as a product of only one factor, in Marxism-Leninism ownership of the means of production and in cultural Marxism which groups, defined by race and gender, have power over which other groups.
• Both define some groups of people as good and others as evil regardless of what individuals do.  Marxism-Leninism defines workers and peasants as good and capitalists and members of the middle class (the hated bourgeoisie) as evil, while cultural Marxism says whites, males, heterosexuals, and non-feminist women are evil while blacks, third world immigrants, gays, and feminists are good.
• Professor Moyn even quotes Victoria’s Governor Kraft as pointing to another parallel:  “Classical Marxists, where they obtain power, expropriated the bourgeoisie and gave their property to the state.  Where you (cultural Marxists) obtained power, you expropriated the rights of White men and gave special privileges to feminists, blacks, gays, and the like.”  Does Professor Moyn deny this has happened in universities all over the country, including probably at Yale where he teaches?

The easiest way to tell you are dealing with cultural Marxist is if he denies the existence of cultural Marxism.  Cultural Marxists seek to work in the dark because they know daylight is fatal to their cause.  If the average person figures out political correctness is a form of Marxism, he rejects it.  That is happening more and more widely, leaving the cultural Marxists with nothing to say but “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”  Their frantic name-calling and denials of historical fact sound more and more desperate because they are losing and are about to be swept from the board.

Meanwhile, read Thomas Hobbes’ Victoria.  That Professor Moyn doesn’t like it means you will. 

tR Live, Episode 4

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week's news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

The View From Olympus: Our Failing Strategy

An article in the November 21 New York Times revealed two aspects of our ongoing strategic failure in Fourth Generation war.  First, it quoted a new study by CSIS that found the number of Sunni 4GW fighters has grown, not shrunk, since we began the “war on terror” on 9/11:

Nearly four times as many Sunni Islamic militants are operating around the world today as on Sept. 11, 2001, despite nearly two decades of American-led campaigns to combat Al Qaeda and the Islamic state, a new independent study concludes.

That amounts to as many as 230,000 Salafi jihadist fighters in nearly 70 countries, according to the study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. . .

. . .the Islamic State remains the predominant threat, with as many as about 40,000 members globally this year, up from 30,200 in 2014, when the group’s fighters seized the northern third of Iraq.

Second, the Times turned to another study to look at what our current strategy has cost:

Last week, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs released its annual report, the Cost of War study, in which it calculated that the United States will have spent $5.9 trillion on activities related to the global counter terrorism campaign by October 2019.

So, the war of attrition waged largely from the air that is our chosen 4GW strategy has, in seventeen years, cost us almost $6 trillion (not billion) while multiplying our Islamic enemies fourfold.  Can we see this as anything other than strategic failure on a grand scale?

The failure was easy to predict.  If we consider strategy not only at the physical level but at Col. John Boyd’s mental and moral levels, a war of attrition in which we remain largely untouchable, high above the clouds, could only work to rally young men everywhere to join whomever we are fighting.  Of course the number of our enemies has grown; we have spent nearly $6 trillion recruiting them.  Every time an American drone hovers ahead, every time we launch an airstrike, every time we flaunt our wealth and power as we bomb people who are poor and weak, we recruit more 4GW enemies.  We nourish and feed the hydra, then wring our hands as it grows more heads.

What might we do instead?  What alternative strategies should we consider? The Times quotes the CSIS study on one alternative:

 “Perhaps the most important component of Western policy should be helping regimes that are facing terrorism improve governance and deal more effectively with economic, sectarian, and other grievances,” the 71-page study concluded.

That won’t work either.  Just as our military fights wars of attrition because that is all it knows how to do, so our foreign policy establishment remains trapped in the ruins of Wilsonianism, the wholly unrealistic belief that we can instruct other people on how to run their countries and cultures.  We can tell them, but they are not going to listen, in part for the good reason that we are likely to be wrong.  Our policy elites’ understanding of how other societies work is both shallow and warped by “Globalist” ideology.  Outside Washington, almost everybody has figured that out, so no one listens to them.

There is an alternative strategy I think might work, or at least work better than recruiting more enemies.  It has two components.  The first is tight border security, far tighter than anything President Trump is planning, tight enough to keep all varieties of 4GW fighters from entering (we will still face the home-grown variety, who in the long run will be more dangerous).  The second component is invisibility.  Since what we are doing now feeds hydra, stop it.  Stop all overt actions around the world.  Bring the troops, planes, drones, and ships home.  Disappear, and thus take away our enemies’ main recruiting tool.  No longer will Somalis or Yemenis or Libyans or Syrians live with the constant hum of American drones overhead, waiting for the Hellfire missile in the night. There may still be drones, but they will not be American drones.  They will have to fight someone else.

And that will be just what we want them to do.  It’s the old strategy of “use barbarians to fight barbarians.”  Sunni jihadis have a lot of enemies besides us: Shiites, Alawites, Hindus, other Sunnis, other tribes, etc. ad infinitum.  Removing our overt presence will remove a unifying factor and encourage them to fight each other.  Covertly, there will be ways for us to ramp up that fighting--and we should.  In some cases, we may even be able to make money doing it.  Have we no Sir Basil Zaharoff?

Chosen as a strategy, inaction can be a form of action, one with far less blowback that our current failing strategy has generated--and far less expensive.  How many more years and trillions will we waste doing more of what does not work?

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

tR Live: Episode 3

The traditionalRIGHT editors discuss the week’s news and anything tangentially related with William S. Lind. Submit questions and comments in the live chat or send them here.

The View From Olympus: A Major Policy Blunder

A frequent sin of conservative governments is throwing away what they have achieved domestically by making major foreign policy blunders.  That danger now looms over President Trump’s government.  His domestic agenda is successful.  The economy is booming, new conservative judges are sitting on important benches and Left-wing regulations are being rolled back.  In the recent elections, a blue wave was met by an equal red wave.  The result was a normal off-year election for the party holding the White House, except the Republicans gained seats in the Senate.  There was no repudiation of President Trump or his agenda.

All this is now being put at risk because of the administration’s China policy.  President Trump has been right to challenge China on trade issues.  Free trade on our part has allowed a mercantilist China to hollow out our industry, depriving Americans of millions of good paying jobs.  China regularly steals intellectual property and forces American companies to turn over trade secrets if they wish to do business with China.  All this should have been challenged by previous presidents, Republican and Democrat.  Their failures to act left President Trump to deal with the whole mess.  To his credit, he is doing so. 

But that does not mean we want a generally hostile relationship with China.  On the contrary, friendship between China, Russia, and the United States is of central importance in confronting the Fourth Generation threat, the danger of state failure and collapse that will define the 21st century.  At stake is the state system itself, and a new Triple Alliance of the three Great Powers is essential to maintaining a world of states.  The alternative is anarchy. 

American policy should seek to separate trade from other issues, confronting China on the former while stressing cooperation in all other fields.  Regrettably, that does not appear to be where the administration is headed.  As the New York Times reported on November 19, “From Mr. Trump’s tweets to defense position papers and a major speech by Mr. Pence on Oct. 4, the United States has made clear that it sees China as a strategic threat.”  That is a blunder of the first order.

The worst of it, so far at least, is that the U.S. is raising the old Taiwan issue.  The administration cut off aid to several central American countries that withdrew diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and established relations with the People’s Republic of China (Beijing).  The White House has been making noises indicating we could strengthen our relationship with Taiwan, including militarily.  This is playing with fire. 

China can compromise on other matters, even her claims to the South China Sea.  But she cannot compromise on Taiwan.  I fear Washington does not understand why that is the case.

Throughout Chinese history, the greatest threat to China has always been internal disunion, break-up into warring states.  This happened over and over again, most recently in the 1920s and 1930s.  Every time it occurs, millions of Chinese die, civil war plunges China into renewed poverty and foreigners take advantage of China’s weakness to invade.  Every Chinese person knows this history, and any Chinese government that hopes to have legitimacy must make it clear that preventing such disunion is its top priority.

The danger Taiwan poses is that it is a Chinese province.  Both the Communist Party and the Kuomintang agree on that.  If one province, Taiwan, can gain independence from China, so can others.  Beijing cannot allow that precedent to be established.  It is an existential threat, and China must and will go to the wall to prevent it.  If that means war with the United States, China has to fight that war.

The Pentagon may think that a naval and air war with China will be an easy win.  China is highly vulnerable to a distant naval blockade.  But if the U.S. Navy were to intervene directly in an attempt to prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, our losses could be severe.  China has developed long-range ballistic missiles that can hit aircraft carriers, or at least come close enough to them, with nuclear warheads, they can either sink them or, with EMP blasts, fry all their electronics and render them floating scrap metal.  Such losses would mark the end of American naval dominance.  Worse yet, because Taiwanese independence is an existential threat to China, if China were losing at sea and in the air, she would feel immense pressure to escalate to the strategic nuclear level.

It is not too late for the administration to separate trade from other issues, continue to confront China on the former while acting to restore good relations in other areas.  Even the trade problem has an obvious solution: managed trade, where the U.S. and China agree on what each is to buy from the other so that the balance of payments is roughly even.  China has made some offers along these lines.  We can and should encourage them to do so until we can agree on the specifics.

Throughout the 20th century, conservative governments around the world overreached in foreign policy, got into wars that did not go well and ended up in disasters that put the Left in power at home.  I hope President Trump is aware of that history. 

 Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

traditionalRIGHT Live, Episode 2

The traditionalRIGHT editors discuss the week's news and anything tangentially related with William S. Lind. Submit questions and comments in the live chat or send them here.

The View From Olympus: An Emerging Dimension of 4GW?

The recent mass shooting at a country music bar in California again raises an important question: are such shootings, at least some of them, an aspect of Fourth Generation war?

When the killing is done in the name of Islam or some other cause, the answer, obviously, is yes.  But so far we know no motive for the California shooter.  So where, if anywhere, does it fit into Fourth Generation war?

The answer, I think, may be that this and similar cases are men’s reply to the war on men being waged by feminism.  When women get seriously angry, they talk.  When men get seriously angry, they kill.  And feminism’s war on men, which is being carried to ever-greater extremes, is making more and more men, especially young men, very angry.

The so-called “#MeToo” campaign is only the latest absurdity.  Of course most women have been subject of sexual advances from men.  It is hard-wired into human nature, and into the nature of most of the animal kingdom, that the male takes the initiative in sexual encounters.  Most women expect and want men to do so.  Remember the old saying, “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses”?  It was understood by all that girls want boys to make passes.  Pity the wallflower and the heart that is broken after the ball.

But feminism now decrees that any man taking the initiative risks being charged with that most heinous of all crimes, “sexual harassment”.  Even if the woman welcomed his advances at the time, if she later changes her mind, he is guilty.  He is presumed guilty until proven innocent and the woman’s word must be taken as true.  The man who is convicted is thrown out of school, loses his job, and may find his whole career path closed to him--all on nothing more than a woman’s word.  Of course men are getting angry.

There is another 4GW dimension that enters the picture here.  As women move into a field, men lose interest in it.  This has been evident in sports for a long time.  But as feminism drives women into more and more previously male venues, men find those venues no longer attractive.  The military is a case in point.  Absurdly, women are now present even in combat units.  Men have traditionally joined armed services in part to prove their manhood.  How do they do that when they have to take orders from women and be terrified that the women around them, in whom they must show no sexual interest, may make the dreaded “sexual harassment” charge against them?  Not surprisingly, the U.S. armed forces find it more and more difficult to recruit.

The Left is busy celebrating the large number of women elected to public office this November.  But one effect of this may be to alienate men further from the political system.  As I have pointed out many times, Fourth Generation war is above all a war for legitimacy.  Will a woman-dominated politics still be legitimate in men’s eyes?  Or will young men in particular respond by transferring their loyalty away from a state that has become a tool of female oppression to something else?  Such transference of primary loyalty lies at the heart of 4GW.

Feminism’s war on men is part of a broader drive of cultural Marxism to the extreme.  It seeks to outlaw more and more aspects of human nature.  Men are to be subjected to women, native-born Americans to immigrants, whites to blacks, and straights to gays.  This is Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values”, which the Frankfurt School made a central element of cultural Marxism.

But when human nature is forced into false channels, it rebels.  As the last two elections have shown, native Americans are rebelling against being submerged in a sea of immigrants and whites are rebelling by raising their own racial consciousness.  Few rebellions are likely to be more powerful than men’s rebellion against feminism, because few aspects of human nature are more powerful motivators than sex.  It may turn out that the “gender war” is more than a metaphor.  If so, it will take far more than gun control to prevent angry young men from killing.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

The View From Olympus: Get Out While We Can

The American position in Afghanistan is not just deteriorating, it is deteriorating at an accelerating rate.  Historically, that is the last stage before a military collapse.

The November 3 New York Times reported in detail how a Taliban infiltrator penetrated a top-level meeting in Kandahar, killed one of Afghanistan’s top generals and almost got the American general commanding our forces there, General Austin S. Miller.  Our reaction made the bad situation worse.  The Times wrote,

The scramble to get the Americans out of the governor’s compound after General Raziq was killed led to a brief firefight between Americans and Afghan security forces, with the Americans crashing through a gate and shooting at least one Afghan officer dead as they left, American officials said.

Now, in the days that have followed, the Americans are being accused of General Raziq’s death, rattling the relationship between the allies.

 Perhaps not surprisingly, the November 4 Times reported another “green on blue” shooting, with one American soldier dead.

Afghanistan has a long history of being a place easy to get into but hard to get out of.  Successful retreats are perhaps the most difficult of all military operations no matter where they are conducted.  Conducting a successful retreat from Afghanistan is near the top of the list of daunting military tasks.

Everyone knows we have lost and will be leaving soon.  We are trying to obtain a peace deal from the Taliban which will permit us at least an orderly withdrawal.  That is wise on our part, and the Taliban are showing some interest.

If that does not happen, what we may face is a widespread realignment within Afghanistan in which everyone tries to get on the good side of the victor, i.e., the Taliban, with American forces still there.  Afghan government soldiers and police will have a tempting opportunity to do that by turning their weapons on any nearby Americans.  In that part of the world, “piling on” the loser is a time-honored way of changing sides to preserve your own neck.

The apparently widespread rumor that the Americans were responsible for General Raziq’s death illustrates the high level of distrust and dislike already present between U.S. and Afghan government forces.  This is one of the strategic factors that are almost always present when an outside power intervenes in someone else’s civil war.  We are foreigners, we have a different religion, our soldiers get far better pay, food, living conditions, and medical care than do Afghan soldiers and police, and we think we know what we are doing in a place we do not understand.  Add to that volatile mix the growing realization that the Taliban are winning and we will soon be leaving, and the incentive for Afghans to change sides grows.

It does not help matters that of our two exit routes, one goes through Pakistan and the other eventually goes through Russia.  Thanks to the usual idiocies from the Washington foreign policy establishment, we have bad relations with both countries.  Pakistan probably won’t slam the door in our face because they want the Taliban to win.  Why?  Because we stupidly allow the current Afghan government to align with India.  Does anyone in Washington know how to think strategically?  Apparently not.

What is needed most now is detailed planning by the Pentagon for a fighting withdrawal.  I am not saying we want to get out that way.  It is contingency planning in case we have to.  I fear that planning will not be done because it will be politically incorrect, since the military leadership still pretends we are winning.  Subordinates will be afraid to initiate planning that contradicts their superiors’ public statements.  But if we have to put a fighting withdrawal together on the fly, a difficult situation will become a great deal more hazardous.  I hope some majors and lieutenant colonels are developing the necessary plan now, even if they can’t tell their bosses what they are doing.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

The View From Olympus: Invasion

The column or caravan of Central Americans slowly moving north through Mexico with the intention of crossing into the U.S. is a classic Fourth Generation war invasion.  An invasion by immigrants is more, not less, dangerous than an invasion by a hostile army because the army eventually goes home while immigrants stay, permanently altering the cultural landscape.  In this case, they would not alter it for the better.

If this country is to survive in a 4GW world, we recognize that this invasion threat is just the flea sitting on the top of the penguin sitting on top of the iceberg.  If this invasion is successful, the next caravan will be larger.  The one after that will be larger still.  A combination of state failure, economic ruin, climate change, and population pressures means millions, tens of millions, ultimately hundreds of millions of people around the world will be trying to move from south to north.  If we don’t stop them, our societies, those north of the equator, will be turned into their societies, which is to say the places they are fleeing because they don’t work.  That may not be their intention (in the case of Islamics, it is their intention), but it will be the result because it is all they know.  Their numbers will be such that they cannot be acculturated by their new societies before those societies are engulfed, overwhelmed, and snuffed out.  

President Trump is right that we cannot allow these people to enter the U.S. and apply for asylum or refugee status.  In the time it will take for their cases to be evaluated, they will simply disappear among the millions of illegal immigrants already here.  They must be stopped at the border or before the border.  Again, this is true not just for the current caravan but for the millions who will be following them.  The question is how to do it.

An old practice, one that was almost universal up to World War II, would help: requiring visas.  To cross a border required not just a passport, which is issued by the country of the person’s origin, but also a visa, which is issued by the country they want to enter.  No visa, no crossing the border.  Some countries still require visas for entry.  Sometimes they can be obtained at the point and time of entry, but more often a would-be border crosser must obtain a visa well beforehand.  Crying “refugee” or “asylum” makes no difference: you still have to have a visa.

Visas would help, but as the 21st century unrolls, the numbers of migrants will be such that the borders will still be overwhelmed.  When ten million people are all heading for your border at once, only one thing will stop them: deadly force.  Again, at least up until World War II, anyone attempting an illegal border crossing was at a substantial risk of getting shot.  Border guards everywhere had standing “shoot to kill” orders.  Snipers were posted to shoot swimmers.  Unless borders are defended by force, they don’t really exist. 

Here we quickly run into one of the most confounding aspects of Fourth Generation war, the power of weakness.  At the moral level, having border guards shoot down women and children is a disaster.  The moral level is more powerful than the physical level, which means states will have great difficulty overcoming public pressure not to shoot.  But if they don’t shoot, they will be invaded and, both as states and as cultures, wiped out.

There are at least a couple of partial answers to this problem.  The first is to make border defenses automatic.  In most cases this should be feasible on land borders.  Defend the borders wherever possible not with men, but with automatic machine guns and the like.  The power of weakness is diminished because the invaders, knowingly walking into deadly threats, look stupid.  Instead of reacting with horror, people will say, “how dumb can you get?”

A second answer is to make the necessary violence invisible.  If invaders come by sea, a la The Camp of the Saints, automatic defenses are less visible.  But if their ships are torpedoed by submarines and spurlos gesenkt, the moral blowback will be less than if the evening news shows a destroyer pumping shells into a ship as desperate people swim for their lives -- and are not rescued.

The feminized culture of sentiment that now rules in Western countries makes any defense difficult.  The strategic key to the West’s defense is to replace that culture with a more masculine culture that wants to fight.  That will happen.  Whether it happens in time is the question.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

traditionalRIGHT Live

William S. Lind and the tR editors talk about the week's news and how it plays into some bigger metapolitical topics. Look for a new livestream each week. If you have questions for a Q&A session with Mr. Lind, submit them as comments on this page, email us here, or use the live chat feature on the next stream.

The View From Olympus: Losing at the Moral/Strategic Level

One of war’s few rules is that failure at a higher level negates the successes at lower levels.  This led to Germany’s defeats in both World Wars; she usually won at the tactical and operational levels but lost at the strategic level.  The result was lost victories.

To look at our own situation today, we need to add John Boyd’s three levels of war, physical, mental, and moral, to the classic levels of tactical, operational, and strategic.  If we plot these categories on a grid, we see that the highest and most powerful level of war is the moral/strategic.  If we look at what we are doing around the world, we see that at the moral/strategic level we are taking actions likely to result in our defeat.

Three examples come readily to mind.  The first is North Korea.  President Trump made a major breakthrough toward ending the danger of another Korean War by meeting with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un.  Unfortunately, since that meeting, the President’s advisors have worked to undercut his achievement.  Kim Jong-un wants the U.S. to declare a formal end to the Korean War, which at present is halted only with an armistice.  South Korea favors it, Mr. Trump is said to favor it, and we risk nothing by giving it.  But the President’s advisors are working against it.  Their position is that we should give North Korea nothing until it completes denuclearization.  That treats North Korea as something it is not, a defeated enemy.  Not surprisingly, North Korea is rejecting that approach, which gives the foreign policy Establishment what it wants -- a continuation of the Korean stand-off and all the budgets and careers that hang from it.

The second example is so bizarre it defies belief.  Washington has placed new sanctions on Chinese companies and individuals because China bought weapons from Russia.  Huh?  What business it is of ours who China buys weapons from?  Ever since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1950 China has bought most of the weapons it has imported from Russia.  Of course it is going to continue to do so.  It is not as if we want to sell weapons to China; we don’t.   This action is so outlandish and absurd it turns the U.S. into Don Quixote, a madman wandering the world tilting at windmills.  Who does Washington think it is?

The third case is similar, in that it is an attempt to dictate to other sovereign countries in matters that are none of our business.  In one of his few serious foreign policy blunders, the President withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear deal with Iran.  Wisely, the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese are working together to keep Iran in and thus avoid a war in the Persian Gulf, with all that would mean for the world’s oil supply.  Washington has responded by threatening any foreign company or bank that does business with Iran.  The October 10 New York Times quoted President Trump’s court jester, John Bolton, as saying, “We do not intend to allow our sanctions to be evaded by Europe or anyone else.”  Again, who do we think we are to tell Europe or anyone else whom they may trade with?  If the EU had a backbone, which it does not, it would forbid any and all European companies to capitulate to unilateral American sanctions.

Each of these cases represents something history has seen all too often, usually from countries that were past their peak as powers and on the downhill slide: the arrogance of power.  We are playing the swaggering bully (just before his nose gets bloodied), wandering around the playground telling everyone else what to do.  It doesn’t go over well.

But each case is more than that: it is a self-inflicted defeat at the moral/strategic level, the highest and most powerful level of conflict.  Morally, it turns us into Goliath (a rather weak-kneed Goliath, given our military record), someone everyone fears but also hates and looks for a chance to get back at.  Strategically, we are pushing China, Russia, and now Europe too, together against us.  If, as Boyd argued, strategy is a game of connection and isolation, we are connecting everyone else and isolating ourselves.

Teddy Roosevelt famously urged America to talk softly and carry a big stick.  Instead, we are yelling for all we’re worth while waving a broken reed, a military that can’t win, and that soon, thanks to feminization, won’t even be able to fight.  That is not likely to end well.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

Weimar America?

The battle over the Kavanaugh nomination saw the Left take yet another giant step toward unreason.  Apparently serious people argued that any woman’s accusation against any man must be believed.  Suddenly, three thousand years of history and literature, in which perfidy of women, their lies and plots that brought disaster, loom large are to be tossed aside.  In their place we are to believe that today’s women carry a “truth serum” gene that makes lies impossible.  Even the (desirable) Victorian elevation of women did not go as far as this.  Victorian women, presented with the idea that women cannot lie, would have responded with gales of laughter.

The left’s rejection of facts and reason in favor of romantic faith in “feelings” is yet another sign of our cultural decay.  That decay has gone far enough to raise the question of whether we are following the path of Weimar Germany, Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.  

To summarize a complex historical period, the collapse of morals and culture in Germany in the 1920s alienated the German middle class from the Weimar Republic.  When the Great Depression hit, that alienation was joined by deep anger at the government’s inability to set the economy right and provide jobs.  Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists rode this mixture of alienation and anger to power (legally, by winning an election).  They then abolished the Weimar constitution, reaffirmed traditional middle-class morality, pulled Germany out of the Depression, and gave jobs to everyone who wanted one (for which the brilliant head of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, deserves much of the credit).

I was in Berlin for ten days in August, where my search for Germany’s history was aided by an excellent guidebook in the Companion Guides series, Berlin by Brian Ladd.  Ladd quotes the interwar novelist Stefan Zweig’s description of Berlin in 1923, during the Weimar Republic’s hyperinflation:

I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions.  All values were changed, and not only material ones; the laws of the State were flouted, no tradition, no moral code was respected, Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world.  Bars, amusement parks, honky-tonks, sprang up like mushrooms. . . the Germans introduced all their vehemence and methodological organization into the perversion.Along the entire Kurfurstendamm powdered and rouged young men sauntered and they were not all professionals; every high school boy wanted to earn some money and in the dimly lit bars one might see government officials and men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without shame.  Even the Rome of Suetonious has never seen such orgies as the pervert balls of Berlin, where hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eyes of the police.In the collapse of all values a kind of madness gained hold particularly in bourgeois circles which until then had been unshakable in their probity.Young girls bragged proudly of their perversion, to be sixteen and still under the suspicion of virginity would have been considered a disgrace in any school of Berlin at that time…

Does this sound all too familiar?  America now witnesses such behavior not only in one city, but throughout the land.  And the Establishment media promote it, bless it, and denounce anyone who rejects it as a “hater”.  A large portion of America’s middle class finds it alienating.

So far, the alienation is tempered by the good economy.  But the Big One is coming, a world-wide debt crisis that will bring not just a recession but a depression and a long-lasting one.  Unlike the Great Depression, I expect this one to be inflationary because central banks will respond to it by creating massive liquidity.  At this point, it is all they know how to do.

If you take widespread cultural alienation, economic collapse, massive unemployment, and inflation and wrap them all up together, you get Weimar America.  Someone will take political advantage of the situation.  I expect that as in Germany under the Weimar constitution, you will have a faceoff between a populist, extreme Left--we’ve certainly seen enough Leftist extremism in the Kavanaugh confirmation battle-- and a populist Right.  At present, only a small slice of the populist Right is extreme.  Most of it is well represented by President Trump, who is a very long way indeed from Adolf Hitler.  President Trump is anti-Establishment, but his agenda lies well within the historical mainstream of American politics.  After all, for most of its history the Republican party was the party of high tariffs.

As in Weimar Germany, the initial push to the extremes has come from the Left, which seems to imagine it can go as far as it wants without eliciting a reaction from the Right.  In Germany, the SA arose largely to counter violence from the Communists.  Here, the Left thought it could raise racial consciousness among blacks and Hispanics without creating a similar rise in racial consciousness on the part of the whites.  It was wrong.  Now, it is openly advocating violence against Republican Party leaders and other prominent conservatives, harassing them in public places, vandalizing their property, and threatening their families.  This too will bring an equal reaction from the Right, and the Left will find to its sorrow that the Right fights rather better than the Left.  

Conservatives do not want to see our public life move in these directions.  The first conservative principle is order: safety of persons and property.  But as in Weimar Germany, the combination of cultural decadence and economic collapse will drive politics to its extremes.  Conservatives should work with moderates and such liberals as dare defy the extreme Left to preserve order.  But if that fails, then only one thing will matter: winning.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

A Second Reformation?

Rome has fallen.

Beginning in the 1960s, most mainline Protestant churches fractured over two divergent understandings of Christianity.  In one camp are those who believe Christianity was revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, in Holy Scripture, and in the traditions of the early church.  The duty of present-day Christians is to pass that heritage, unaltered and undiminished to future generations until the Lord comes again.  In the other camp are those who believe the faith must reflect the Zeitgeist, altering itself as necessary to maintain a broad appeal.  They see revelation as an ongoing process in which new commandments can override old. 

Under a veneer of unity, this same tension has been present within the Roman Catholic church.  With the release of Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s recent letter attributing priestly pedophilia to a widespread toleration of homosexuality among Roman clergy, the fracture is in the open.  The Zeitgeist has proclaimed homosexuality normal and, as in the mainline Protestant churches, the faction within the Roman church that follows the Zeitgeist must follow suit.  To traditional Christians this is anathema.  Rome appears headed for schism.

This may be good news.  A schism within the Roman church and the emergence of a sizeable Roman “continuing church” would create the possibility of a second Reformation, with the difference that this Reformation would unify rather than divide.  “Continuing church” Protestants and Catholics would have more in common with each other than with modernizers in their own denominations; the same would be true for the other side.  It is conceivable that Catholics and Protestants could unite in two new churches, one reflecting Zeitgeist, the other upholding traditional Christianity.  Given the number of both Catholic and Protestants traditionalists, a new, united “continuing church” might be the larger--large enough to wield substantial cultural and political power. 

To be sure, the obstacles would be significant, especially for the traditionalists.  Traditional Protestants and Catholics would each have to look back before the Reformation to find common ground.  Protestants would have to accept a Catholic understanding of the Eucharist and adopt a valid liturgy for their communion services (even some Baptist churches had liturgy up into the early 1900s).  Catholics would have to share the Apostolic Succession with non-Catholic male clergy and forego requiring that Protestants accept the innovations arising out of the Council of Trent, Vatican I and Vatican II.  The Holy Spirit would have to do some heavy lifting to make a union come about. 

What might be the strategic implications of such a second Reformation?  Since the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, the West has discounted religion as a strategic factor.  But at present, the primary strategic weakness of the West is that it no longer believes in itself.  Western culture’s will to live died in World War I, in the mud and slaughter of the Western Front.  After the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele, the best lacked all conviction.  Fascism attempted to recover by exalting the will, but fascism failed, felled by its own errors.  And so today as the old West, Europe, is invaded by hordes of mendicants from strange cultures, the European elites offer their countries as doormats.  

As Russell Kirk wrote, “Culture comes from the cult.”  Religion has been at the heart of most, perhaps all cultures since human culture arose.  While the First World War collapsed the West’s faith in itself, the religion at the core of Western culture had long been under assault by rationalism.  Fractured by the first Reformation, the church could no longer speak with the united voice necessary to reply convincingly (about this, see Brad S. Gregory’s recent book, The Unintended Reformation).  To Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum,” a united church would have answered, “Non est.  Dues cogitavit, ergo es.”

How can Western culture recover the will to live when, in Europe, the churches are empty because most of the clergy no longer believe the Nicene Creed, while in the U.S. many of the most popular churches preach a therapeutic narcissism that has little to do with taking up your cross and following Jesus?  Among the ruling elites in both Europe and America, Christian faith is regarded as spiritual eczema, an unfortunate condition to be covered up in public.  It can have no role to play in strategy; the very notion is absurd.

This, then, is the potential strategic significance of a second Reformation, one that unites all traditional Christians in one church:  the West’s recovery of the will to live.  Far from being strategically unimportant, religion is now as it always has been, one of the most powerful strategic factors, a lesson the Islamics teach us regularly on our own soil.  Culture comes from the cult, and a united church, marching as to war, could revive Western people's’ belief in their culture and in themselves.  Deus vult.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

The View From Olympus: What's an Army For?

Both the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps are failing to meet their recruiting and end-strength goals.  One obvious reason is the hot economy which offers plenty of jobs.  A less obvious cause, mentioned to me by a friend in the National Guard, is the effect on recruiting of the endless television ads about “wounded warriors”.  These ads bring home to young men the unpleasant reality that joining the military can lead to life-changing injuries.

A third cause is the endless, pointless wars we continue to pursue in the Middle East and Afghanistan.  Whatever the initial rationale for these conflicts was, most people have since forgotten it, including both the decision-makers in Washington and the young men in the recruiting pool.  Who wants to sign up to fight halfway around the world for a cause no one can remember?

That question points to a larger one: in today’s world, what is an army for (here I include the Marine Corps as well)?  Some Third World countries may still face a threat from another state and need an army to counter it, e.g., India and Pakistan.  But even there, nuclear weapons make such a conflict unlikely, at least on a large scale.  European militaries have atrophied to the vanishing point because they have no obvious mission.

In Washington, the neo-libs and neo-cons together have tried to answer the question by using our Army and Marine Corps to force the dubious benefits of “democratic capitalism” down the throats of Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, and, if they get their way, Iranians.  But the attempts have all failed and, in every case, made the local situation worse.  In the end, even Robespierre said that missionaries with bayonets are seldom welcome. 

So both here and in Europe, no one in the Establishment has an answer to the question, what’s an army for?  No wonder our Army and Marine Corps cannot recruit.  If the trumpet sounds uncertain, who will follow?

The question does, however, have an answer.  It is one the Establishment refuses even to contemplate because to do so violates the dictates of cultural Marxism, aka political correctness.  The real threat facing both the United States and European states is Fourth Generation war on their own soil.  In both places, the most numerous carriers of that bacillus are immigrants to have not acculturated or, when we are talking about Moslem immigrants, will not acculturate.  

The threat is greatest in Europe.  Islamic immigration has so far been small enough that it is not yet a major security factor in the U.S.  Our Hispanic immigrants are already Christians, and most want to acculturate and become normal, middle-class Americans.  That is why they came here.  They have come in such numbers that they have overwhelmed the acculturating mechanisms, and President Trump is correct that we need to stop illegal immigration and limit the legal variety.  We faced a similar situation in the early 20th century, which we solved by doing exactly that.  Over time, those immigrants became Americans. 

But the Islamics in Europe have no intention of becoming Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Swedes.  They are there to conquer the countries they have invaded and force Islam upon them.  It is always to the state’s advantage to define such threats as problems for law enforcement, not the military.  But the Islamic’s numbers in some European countries are so great that they already stand on the verge of civil war.

European armies, what is left of them, will discover what they are for: protecting their nation’s historic culture, patrimony, and native people from 4GW enemies.  They are already doing that on the streets of France.  But what about the U.S. Army and Marine Corps?

Blood is thicker than water.  Will the U.S. stand aside if there is a bloody war in the cities of Britain or France or Italy or Sweden?  No.  At that point cultural Marxism and its “multiculturalism” will stand revealed as the lie and fraud that they are.  Our families came from those countries, and we will send American soldiers and Marines to protect those we left behind.  When that happens, we will have no problem finding recruits for wars that are worth fighting.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

How the Mainstream Media Mislead

A police shooting last week in Dallas, Texas was interesting not because of what the mainstream press reported, but of what they did not report.  What they did not report reveals how they often mislead the public, to the point of becoming "fake news".

The incident, a tragic one, involved a female Dallas police officer who apparently mistook a neighbor’s apartment for her own, walked in, encountered a black male, and shot him fatally.  The man was a respectable citizen, a risk analyst for a global auditing firm.  Some facts remain in dispute, but the police officer has been charged with manslaughter.

In a major story on the incident, the New York Times reported on September 15 that

In some ways, the drama unfolding in Dallas looks and feels similar to other high-profile police shootings of unarmed black men that have gripped the country in succession in recent years.

The Times quoted State Senator Royce West,

a Democrat who is African-American and whose district includes the South Side Flats (where the incident occurred).  “The question is whether or not she saw a black man and then decided to shoot.  Regardless of whether or not he was in the right place or not, her first impulse appeared to be that she was going to fire her weapon."

Two facts loom over this incident, neither of which the Times reported--nor, probably, did any other mainstream media.  First, cops react to black males the way they do because the black rate of crime is twelve times the white rate, and most of that crime is committed by young black males.  Two different studies, both based on U.S. government statistics, support the twelve times figure:  Jared Taylor’s The Color of Crime and a detailed study by Ron Unz which was published some years ago in The American Conservative magazine (Unz did not report his findings in those terms, but I spoke with him at the time and he said his numbers also pointed to a black rate about twelve times the white rate).  So high is the violent crime rate of young black males that everyone avoids them if they can, including other blacks (most of the victims of black crime are also black).  Cops cannot avoid them; on the contrary, their duty to protect the rest of us means they must confront them, which often leads to cops getting hurt or killed.  Police are and must be realists, however much the mainstream press passes over in silence the realities they face.

The Dallas shooting points to another fact the fake media ignore: women are poorly suited to most police work because they cannot deal with a hostile male except by reaching for their gun.  Although the movies are full of petite, lovely women beating up big men, in real life that seldom happens.  Most men will win a physical fight with most women, including most women cops.  As any cop will tell you, police officers get in lots of fights.  Most male cops can keep the level of violence below deadly force because they can win a fight with another man.  A woman cop has to go for her gun, sometimes at the outset.  That may be what happened in this case.

Why won’t the mainstream media report these facts?  Because they are politically incorrect.  Cultural Marxism demands we pretend there are no differences between races or ethnic groups or between men and women.  As everyone knows, reality says otherwise.  But the mainstream media is completely controlled by the cultural Marxists: defy them and you get fired.

So the “fake news” mainstream media wins that title not by what it prints but by what it leaves out.  Over and over, on issue after issue, the mainline press misleads the public by refusing to report salient facts, like the two I have pointed out here.

We can even give them a little test.  I am a New York Times subscriber.  I challenge the editor to print this column.  It speaks directly to one of your stories.  It could not be more relevant.

Chicken?  You bet he is.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

The Deep State Speaks

In the instantly infamous anonymous op-ed published in the Sept. 6 New York Times, “The Quiet Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, the Deep State found its voice.  Anyone who doubted its existence can set their doubts aside.  The op-ed is the Deep State’s equivalent of the burning bush and the voice proclaiming, “I am.”

The core of the op ed is found in its first and second paragraphs:

. . . many of the senior officials in his own (President Trump’s) administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda. . .

I would know.  I am one of them.

The op-ed contains both less and more than meets the eye.  It may shock the average American to think that members of a President’s own administration would work against his agenda, but anyone who has served in Washington knows it happens all the time.  And not only to Presidents; Senators, Congressmen, Cabinet members, military commanders, anyone senior enough to have a staff also has staffers with their own agendas.  They push those agendas when and as they can, including when they conflict with the agenda of the person they serve.  It is so common it has become a rule of institutional behavior, known as Rankovic’s Law:  It is easier for the subordinate to control the superior than for the superior to control the subordinate.  The op-ed’s boast that there is an organized faction in President Trump’s administration working against parts of his agenda goes a bit beyond the norm, but it has certainly been seen before. 

Also unsurprising is the op-ed’s revelation that this faction is attempting to promote orthodox Republican Establishment policies such as deregulation, tax cuts, and more money for the Pentagon as opposed to the populist policies that got President Trump elected.  Much of what goes on in Washington is an effort to subvert the popular will.  Those who can do so successfully on behalf of monied interests often get very rich.

This brings us to what the op-ed reveals that is surprising; surprising not because we have not previously suspected it but because the Deep State now feels confident enough to say it openly:  the Deep State wants international conflict.  The op-ed includes a bald-faced declaration to that effect:

Take foreign policy: in public and private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-Un . . .

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly. . .

The op-ed goes on to talk approvingly about how the Deep State has punished Russia against the President’s wishes, to the point of boasting about it:

He (President Trump) complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country . . .

But his national security team knew better – such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

Here is the significance of the op-ed, not in what it reveals about President Trump but what it says about the Deep State itself, namely that it thrives on unnecessary and strategically counterproductive international conflicts.  Those conflicts justify the trillion dollar “national security” budget off which the Deep State feeds, they provide the arenas in which the “national security team” builds its careers and power and they distract the public from our sorry military performance against the real threat, the threat of Fourth Generation war and the entities that wage it.  They are, in short, bread for the Establishment and circuses for the citizens.

The op-ed seeks to paint a picture of a valiant band of prudent senior officials holding a dangerous, half-mad President in check.  What it actually portrays is a corrupt bunch of interests that feed off the status quo sabotaging a President who seeks to improve relations with Russia and North Korea, avoid unnecessary wars (except possibly with Iran), and put America first.  The op-ed should, as it intends, leave Americans scared--scared not of a maniac in the White House, but of a Deep State so confident of its own power and invulnerability that it can go public with the truth it has previously tried to hide: the Deep State, not the people elected to the office, runs the country.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

The View From Olympus: Are the Generals Risking their Legitimacy?

The September 3 New York Times reported that General John Nicholson, our supreme commander in Afghanistan for the last 31 months, in his departing speech as he turned over his command called for an end to the war.

Nearly 17 years to the day (since 9/11), now a four-star general departing as the commander of the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, (General Nicholson) stood under the shade of pine trees in Kabul on Sunday, and delivered an emotional farewell.

The general. . . said he wanted to speak from the heart.

“It is time for this war in Afghanistan to end,” General Nicholson said.

Well, yes.  That has been true since the failure of the U.S. Army’s attempt to encircle and capture Osama bin Laden in the first couple months of the conflict.  But why did General Nicholson wait until he was giving up his authority and leaving the country to state the obvious?  When President Donald Trump wanted to end the war and bring our troops home, did General Nicholson support him?  Or did he remain silent, or, worse, join the piling-on when our senior generals convinced the President to stay and send in more troops?

The frequency and blatancy of American generals’ failure of moral courage appears to be growing.  It is not a new problem.  During the entire Vietnam war, not a single service chief resigned in protest, though many said after their retirement that they knew we could not win.  Generals and admirals alike have long done nothing in the face of vast procurement debacles, like the ongoing disasters that are the Ford-class aircraft carriers and the F-35 fighter/bomber.  All senior military leaders have presided for decades over a Second Generation military, with only a few, such as Marine Corps Commandant General A.M. Gray, attempting to wake their service from its slumber and move it at least into the Third Generation as war moves into the Fourth.  No one, it seems, ever told American generals one of the Church's oldest truths, that the sin of omission is as grave as the sin of commission.

Yet now we are seeing more and more cases of generals making active blunders, blunders that reveal their distance from their troops and the realities they face in the field as well as a lack of moral courage.  In the Marine Corps, a Commandant, General Neller, had to concur in the relief of Lt. Col. Marcus Mainz, the Corps’ best battalion commander, for the trivial offense of using a politically incorrect word when speaking to his Marines.  Such public groveling before the idol of cultural Marxism should alone disqualify anyone from commanding anything.  Now, the Chief of Staff of the Army is pushing a new physical fitness test, the ACFT (Army Combat Fitness Test), that from preliminary results may force at least a third of our soldiers out--at a time when the Army is falling short of its recruiting goals and end-strength.  Does he have any awareness of his service's realities beyond his (plush) office?  Could he pass the ACFT himself?

Generals need two kinds of legitimacy if they are to be effective as military leaders.  They need legitimacy in the eyes of the men they command and they need legitimacy before their political superiors, which in our case includes the American public.  History is full of the names of generals who, by their own military incompetence, their disconnect with their troops, and their alienation from their political bosses were failures, often to the point of destroying their armies and their countries.  Heading the list in the 20th century is Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, Chief of the K.u.K. (Austro-Hungarian) General Staff before and during much of World War I.  His campaign plans were such colossal failures that he virtually devoured his own army; his initial offensive in Galicia in 1914 wiped out the peacetime Austrian army in three weeks.  During the entire war he visited the front only three times, living the high life of wine, women, and song in AOK, his headquarters in Poland, as Vienna starved.  Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination at Sarajevo touched off the war Conrad wanted and the Archduke did not, loathed him and tried to force him out.  Franz Ferdinand could have saved the Hapsburg Monarchy; Conrad destroyed it.

America’s generals’ legitimacy is increasingly in question, for much the same reasons: military incompetence, i.e., wars lost; distance from those they nominally lead; and moral cowardice, as in the Mainz affair, that alienates much of their conservative political base.  Who among our generals should get the Conrad Prize?  Nominations are open.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.