Tag: war

I have absolutely no doubts about it. It simply does not possess a serious military any longer.

26th MEU battalion commander fired during deployment over equal opportunity concerns.

An infantry battalion commander sacked in the middle of a deployment with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, was at least partially fired for allegedly using a term that could be disparaging to members of the LGBTQ community, Marine Corps Times has learned.

Following a vandalism incident during a port call visit by the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock New York in Gaeta, Italy, Lt. Col. Marcus J. Mainz, the commander of 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, allegedly used the term “faggot” or “faggoty” during a meeting with the 2/6 Battalion Landing Team leaders, multiple sources have told Marine Corps Times.

Corps officials have said Lt. Col. Marcus J. Mainz was fired May 19 over a loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead.

My grandfather, described as the Marine’s Marine by the Commandant himself, used saltier language when telling us to get up in the morning. When we were in elementary school.

Journalists and politicians inevitably overestimate the importance of diplomacy and “sending messages”:

Clearly, Putin hopes to avoid Washington’s orchestrated attack by having his ambassador explain the orchestration to the American officials who are orchestrating it. This strategy implies that Putin thinks US government officials are capable of shame and integrity. They most certainly are not. I spent 25 years with them. They don’t even know what the words mean.

What if, instead, Putin had declared publicly for the entire world to hear that any forces, wherever located, responsible for an attack on Syria would be annihiliated? My view—and that of Russian patriot Bogdasarov— is that such an ultimatum from the leader of the country capable of delivering it would cool the jets of Russophobic Washington. There would be no attack on Syria.

Bogdasarov and I might be wrong. The Russian forces deployed around Syria with their hypersonic missiles are more than a match for the US forces assembled to attack Syria. However, American hubris can certainly prevail over facts, in which case Putin would have to destroy the sources of the attack. By not committing in advance, Putin retains flexibility. Washington’s attack, like its previous attack on Syria, might be a face-saver, not a real attack. Nevertheless, sooner or later Russia will have to deliver a firmer response to provocations.

I am an American. I am not a Russian, much less a Russian nationalist. I do not want US military personnel to be casualties of Washington’s fatal desire for world hegemony, much less to be casualties of Washington serving Israel’s interests in the Middle East. The reason I think Putin needs to do a better job of standing up to Washington is that I think, based on history, that appeasement encourages more provocations, and it comes to a point when you have to surrender or fight. It is much better to stop this process in its tracks before it reaches that dangerous point.

Andrei Martyanov, whose book I recently reviewed on my website, recently defended Putin, as The Saker and I have done in the past, from claims that Putin is too passive in the face of assaults. As I have made the same points, I can only applaud Martyanov and The Saker. Where we might differ is in recognizing that endlessly accepting insults and provocations encourages their increase until the only alternative is surrender or war.

So, the questions for Andrei Martyanov, The Saker, and for Putin and the Russian government is: How long does turning your other cheek work? Do you turn your other cheek so long as to allow your opponent to neutralize your advantage in a confrontation? Do you turn your other cheek so long that you lose the support of the patriotic population for your failure to defend the country’s honor? Do you turn your other cheek so long that you are eventually forced into war or submission? Do you turn your other cheek so long that the result is nuclear war?

I think that Martyanov and The Saker agree that my question is a valid one. Both emphazise in their highly informative writings that the court historians misrepresent wars in the interest of victors. Let’s give this a moment’s thought. Both Napoleon and Hitler stood at their apogee, their success unmitigated by any military defeat. Then they marched into Russia and were utterly destroyed. Why did they do this? They did it because their success had given them massive arogance and belief in their “exceptionalism,” the dangerous word that encapsulates Washington’s belief in its hegemony.

The zionist neoconsevatives who rule in Washington are capable of the same mistake that Napoleon and Hitler made. They believe in “the end of history,” that the Soviet collapse means history has chosen America as the model for the future. Their hubris actually exceeds that of Napoleon and Hitler.

If nuclear war is going to take place – and I don’t believe it is – it is not going to be the result of an insufficiency of threats. What does Paul Craig Roberts expect Putin to do, issue an ultimatum to people who make a habit of issuing empty threats and ultimatums to others? What would that accomplish?

Putin is absolutely doing the right thing by refusing to tie his hands or commit himself to a war that will do no one any good any sooner than he absolutely must. Furthermore, the more time passes, the weaker the US military will become, and the stronger the Chinese and Russian militaries will be relative to it. And if he can use that time to not only build up his military, but weaken the relationship between the USA and the western European countries, so much the better.

While some of the more unstable neocons might seriously want nuclear war, I don’t believe anyone in the US military or the White House does. All that Putin drawing a firm line in Syria would accomplish is giving the necons a trigger that they could pull by arranging for someone to publicly cross it. Roberts is giving advice that actually increases the very risks that he seeks to reduce.

The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media is ignoring the slaughter in South Africa, just like it ignored the slaughter in the Ukraine:

The Agri SA agricultural union in Pretoria, South Africa, released new figures that reveal black criminal gangs have killed one white South African farmer every five days so far this year! Is this “only” random crime taking place in a troubled and dark land or a plan to drive all farmers off their land by intimidation?

South African officials suggest that these killings are only “burglaries gone wrong” but informed and honest people (black and white) know the truth. The government stopped accounting for such deaths since it is too embarrassing. Hence, “burglaries gone wrong” headlines result in less negative press than “another white farm family wiped out by roaming black thugs.”

The head of Genocide Watch, Dr. Gregory Stanton in 2012 conducted a study in South Africa and came to an incredible conclusion: “There is a coordinated campaign of genocide being conducted against white farmers.” Many of the Whites surrendered their guns when the African National Congress (ANC) government passed gun laws to confiscate the farmers’ weapons.

Meanwhile, the constant media drumbeat about the terrible, awful, no-good, very bad anti-semitism on the part of Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour Party, and the BDS movement continues.

And as usual, whites make the mistake of assuming that those who hate them will somehow be dissuaded by the argument that their destruction will be materially deleterious for those who destroy them. It’s a remarkably stupid materialist argument. Does anyone imagine that any Mongol general gave even a quantum of a damn that the horde he commanded might have profited more from not slaughtering every living creature in the cities they successfully besieged?

The decline of the United States Marine Corps is already in full effect:

The Basic School for Marine Officers is reeling from a cheating scandal that involved six second lieutenants accused of wrongfully obtaining and sharing key grid points for the night land navigation course.

The officers were accused of sharing the grid points via text messages ­before the test and later relying on them to find hidden boxes stashed across the wooded night land ­navigation course in Quantico, Virginia, ­according to interviews with Marine Corps officials and a copy of the command investigation obtained by Marine Corps Times.

The Marine Corps considers that cheating because the students were able to complete the course without demonstrating the key skills the course aims to evaluate: conducting proper land navigation.

One guess as to why.

One of the other alleged cheaters, a female second lieutenant, with the assumed name Lt. Delta, confided in the other student she “could pass Final Night Land Navigation by plotting the boxes beforehand,” according to the command investigation. The female lieutenant spoke to Marine Corps Times on condition of anonymity.

But surely these fine Marine officers will take full responsibility for their actions and resign their commissions, right?

One of the two female officers ensnared in the ­cheating scandal, Lt. Delta, accused other TBS officers of gender discrimination during the investigation…. Before the entire land navigation situation ­happened, Lt. Delta had filed a restricted sexual ­assault allegation, in November 2017. She was ­assigned a uniformed victims advocate, another Marine who is trained and assigned to provide support to sexual assault victims. 

Of course she did. But not to worry. Since we are told that diversity makes everything stronger, I have no doubt that its manifold blessings will more than make up for officers who lack integrity, won’t take responsibility, and can’t read a map.

Q points to historical revionism:

Buy a history book published 20 years ago.
Buy a history book published 10 years ago.
Buy a history book published this year.
Compare.
Focus on WWI/WWII
Something ALARMING will be discovered.
Q

Since I tend to read history books published prior to WWII, my library is not a good source for working out this one. Anyone have any ideas?

Eventually, inevitably, the decadence and demoralization of imperial society catches up with the leading military power. As the Z-man notes, the USA is no exception in this regard:

For starters, the sorts of men excited about taking orders from a girl are not the sorts of men you want fighting your wars. That only works in Hollywood propaganda. That propaganda, however, has had an impact on the culture. As a result, a decreasing number of men are physically able to meet the minimum requirements. A boy who spent his formative years playing video games and being asked if he would prefer to wear a dress, is unlikely to have the ability to make it through basic, much less be a good soldier.

Then you have the fact that white guys are starting to figure out that the government is their enemy, so signing up to fight for the government is not in their interests. Part of it is the fact that the public has figured out that the neocon response to 9/11 was a scam. They did not care about keeping the country safe from Islam. They only cared about keeping Israel safe from Islam. Importing millions of Muslims after 9/11 did not go unnoticed. A volunteer army relies on patriotism to fill the ranks. Fighting for strangers does not cut it.

There’s also the fact that whites are getting wise to what’s happening and public trust is plummeting. A volunteer army not only relies on patriotism, but it relies on civic duty. It is why we still call military service a duty. Some still call politics “public service” even though no one is so naive these days. The point is, like patriotism, civic nationalism is a social contract. Both parties have to uphold their end of the deal in order for it to work. It’s why blacks lack patriotism and they have never been willing to join the military.

The black issue is one to understand. We are constantly bombarded with propaganda about the heroic blacks in the military, but blacks have always been under represented in the services. Blacks, of course, are leading the charge against the  national anthem. It’s not just a stunt by coddled athletes. Blacks in America have never felt a sense of duty to the country, which makes perfect sense, given the nature of black identity. If you see society as dominated by the people you hate, why would you feel loyalty to society?

Then you have the much celebrated browning of America. As of the last census, the majority of people under-18 are non-white. By the next census, it will be distinctly non-white. War fighting is a young man’s game. A military built to run on smart white guys with a sense of duty is not going to function when it has to rely on non-whites, who despise their host population. Inevitably, the military is going to start looking like a Chicano version of Stripes. No one says it, but everyone in charge sees the problem.

This is one of the many reasons that Trump and the generals would be wise to ignore the increasingly desperate blandishments of the neocon imperialists to go to war somewhere against somebody. It’s only the relatively small size of the commitments and the caution of the generals that has permitted the US military to avoid a Syracuse-style disaster of the sort that crippled the Athenian Empire.

Trump is why British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is under relentless attack in Britain:

“Besieged for four years, Corbyn has been abandoned. Few respected politicians want to risk being cast out into the wilderness, like Ken Livingstone, as an anti-Semite. Corbyn himself has conceded too much ground on anti-semitism. He has tried to placate rather than defy the smearers.”

Cook points out that by conceding ground, Corbyn betrayed Palestinians and betrayed anti-Zionist Jews who were expelled by droves from Labour. Even Tony Greenstein, a Jewish nationalist though anti-Zionist, had been expelled; the same Tony Greenstein who attacked me and Gilad Atzmon for our anti-Semitism (I responded to him here). He was also sent home packing. The late Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor and defender of Palestinian rights, a personal friend of Corbyn, had been denounced. Palestinians were betrayed, and we should care about them more than about Jewish fine feelings.

But why should we give a damn about Corbyn and/or Palestinians if we aren’t British voters? I’ll tell you.

In the British establishment, pro-Jewish forces decided to side with the Washington War Party to push us close to war. The recent visit of the British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt (the man on the shortlist of Israel’s agents within the British establishment) to Washington where Hunt delivered a speech calling for full-out war on Russia, “has been read as an intervention on the side of the anti-Russian faction in the split and divided US administration”, said the Guardian.

The speech is just an opening, missiles will follow soon. Today, I was informed by my contacts, the Russians have delivered a demarche to the State Department, warning the Americans to desist from their plans to attack Syria. Russian intelligence learned that eight tanks containing chlorine have been delivered to Halluz village of Idlib province where the group of specially trained militants has already been deployed in order to simulate the rescue of the victims of chemical attack. The militants were trained by the British private military company Olive (which had merged with the American Constellis Group.

This explains a lot. I have been wondering why the British media have been waging such an over-the-top campaign against Jeremy Corbyn of late, with several MPs throwing massive hissy fits of the sort that would normally suffice to get them kicked out of the Labour Party. The reason is that Britain has become the favored weapon of the neocons and the Deep State to provoke war with Russia now that it is clear that Trump has no intention of playing ball. But Corbyn, who is far more popular than any of his party rivals, stands in their way, so they are desperate to get him out of the picture before Trump manages to turn his attention to Britain and the three other Five Eyes states.

To date, Corbyn has simply remained passive and calmly weathered the attacks. Since that hasn’t worked, I suspect he will soon take action to expel his attackers from the party. After all, what are they going to do, join the Conservative Party?

It’s not a coincidence that both Trump and Corbyn are under assault. Despite their ideological differences, both men are sane enough to be determined to avoid more totally unnecessary wars that are not in the American or the British national interests.

As the prospects for actual conflict grow, more and more right-wingers are beginning to realize that conservatives cannot be relied upon to fight for anything:

Would conservatives achieve an easy victory against the left if it came down to civil war?  The question seems less absurd by the day as tensions increase between the right and left.  Many conservative writers seem to think the left would fold quickly and the right would triumph. One has good reason to doubt that.  Consider basic issues like political bias in universities, or religious integrity.  After decades of exposés and outcries from conservatives over liberal tyranny, universities are as biased as they ever were….

I am nowhere near as confident as Kurt Schlichter that the right wing could trounce the left wing in battle.  We can’t even unite to keep Alex Jones on Facebook.  It is true that conservatives have more guns and are probably better street fighters.  But conservatives also cave in large numbers even when their most sacred cows are in danger – such as the First Amendment or Christian principles.  The two latter issues sit at the core of academic bias and debates on sexuality, respectively.  I have the war wounds from both battles and can attest to the repeating scenario: conservatives talk and talk about what they believe and how bad the left is.  Then they give up droves when it comes time to fight.

Take the question of defending the gospel.  We hear constant sermons from Christian preachers that speak of standing by God’s word even in the face of popular criticism.  In anticipation of the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, I spent months searching for people be willing to sign on to a resolution affirming Christian sexual ethics and supporting churches’ rights to offer counseling in defiance of laws like California’s “stay gay” bill.  Almost sixteen million Americans claim to be Southern Baptists.  I could not find a single person willing to back the resolution.  When I submitted it under my own name, it was killed in committee and never brought to the floor.

If you look at the history of ideologically-based civil wars, the odds most certainly do not favor the more conservative sides. The Spanish Civil War was one of the few in which the socialists were ultimately defeated, and yet, neither Franco nor the Phalange were ever embraced by the Right throughout the West.

I’ve been reading James Burnham’s Suicide of the West, and one of the things that is particularly shocking is his 39-question poll which divides the conservatives of 1965 from liberal-progressives. I’ll post it later today, as it shows very clearly that today’s conservatives are yesterday’s progressives.

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

I’m going to talk about Civil War 2.0 and I’m going to talk about the book Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin and what it has to do with the situation that the United States is presently facing. Now this is not a book that I would recommend to everyone, although it’s an important book, unless you’re someone who regularly reads history for fun, unless you’ve got an IQ in the 120 and up range,  this isn’t going to be the book for you. It’s an academic book it’s written in a very academic research style. The author, Peter Turchin, is very intelligent, but he is also very caught up in the mainstream narrative and so you need to be aware of that and not get too carried away by it. You know, not take it as gospel truth.

The way that it’s interesting, what’s interesting about it,  is that it gives you some new tools with which you can analyze the current situation. The thing that I thought was particularly striking about it, and what I’d liked about it, is that Turchin makes a real effort to put things in a proper historical context. He doesn’t just come up with a thesis and apply it solely, or even primarily, to the situation right now, but he also applies it to other historical situations. I believe he had a recent blog post, the one that I linked to today, where he talks about how he applied his calculations to thirty different historical situations, and that is taking a really intelligent approach to it. Instead of just saying, “well I think X is going to happen” and taking shots in the dark, what he did was he looked at the thirty historical situations and then measured their outcomes, and what he came up with should be disturbing to those who think that things are always going to work out just fine is that in ninety percent of the high-stress societal crises there was what he considers to be a negative outcome.

So what he is projecting, using his own metrics, his own tools, is a situation that he considers to be mid to high-level severity, and that ranges from serious societal disruption to full-blown civil war. Now I personally don’t subscribe to the full-blown civil war theory simply because there are no two obvious sides. I think that we’re much more likely to see a breakup and a collapse of the central government as well as the basic societal narrative rather than two discrete sides like we had with the North and the South during the U.S. Civil War of 1861-1865, but what’s particularly interesting about Turchin’s work is that it’s based on the concept of measuring societal stress.

The level of stress in the United States in 2016 was roughly comparable to the level of societal stress seen in 1860, and that’s very, very consistent with observations that you’ve seen from other students of history and military history, where it’s been said everything that’s happening in the United States – I
woud actually push that further and I would say everything that’s happening across the West – is essentially positioning for civil war.