Tag: war

ISIS is good for the Jews?

Therefore, don’t destroy it, protect it from Russia, Syria, and Iran:

According to a think tank that does contract work for NATO and the Israeli government, the West should not destroy ISIS, the fascist Islamist extremist group that is committing genocide and ethnically cleansing minority groups in Syria and Iraq.

Why? The so-called Islamic State “can be a useful tool in undermining” Iran, Hezbollah, Syria and Russia, argues the think tank’s director.

“The continuing existence of IS serves a strategic purpose,” wrote Efraim Inbar in “The Destruction of Islamic State Is a Strategic Mistake,” a paper published on Aug. 2.

By cooperating with Russia to fight the genocidal extremist group, the United States is committing a “strategic folly” that will “enhance the power of the Moscow-Tehran-Damascus axis,” Inbar argued, implying that Russia, Iran and Syria are forming a strategic alliance to dominate the Middle East.

“The West should seek the further weakening of Islamic State, but not its destruction,” he added. “A weak IS is, counterintuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS.”

Inbar, an influential Israeli scholar, is the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank that says its mission is to advance “a realist, conservative, and Zionist agenda in the search for security and peace for Israel.”

I think someone needs to explain the concept of “optics” to this guy. Does he really think it is a good idea for Israel to publicly ally with Islamic State? The Europeans are already less than entirely keen on Israel, and more and more Americans are beginning to question whether the Jews in their midst are on their side or not.

Coming out as ISIS allies strikes me as utter madness. But I’m not the strategic expert. The great Israeli military historian, and Castalia House author, Martin van Creveld is. It would be interesting to know what he makes of this, as he has written forcefully of how to fight Daesh.

Korean fire drill

William S. Lind warns that the next flash point in Asia may not be Indonesia, the Philippines, or the old Japan-China rivalry:

By now, the Korean drill is familiar to all. We take some symbolic action against North Korea. The North responds with its Tasmanian Devil act, threatening “lakes of fire”, firing missiles into the ocean and maybe, at the limit, shooting some artillery at South Korea. Casualties, if there are any, are few. South Korea in turn tugs at its leash, which we hold firmly. Yawn.

This time may be different. We did the usual, announcing some meaningless new sanctions on the North, though this time targeting its rulers by name, which slightly ups the ante. The North is playing its part, shouting hyperbolic threats, including war.

But here is where the current case departs from the script. No one is paying any attention to North Korea’s tantrum. We’ve seen it too often. The world’s reaction is, “let ’em starve in the dark.” From the North Korean perspective, the act no longer works.

Except in South Korea. This is the second change from the usual script. The South is fed up with the North’s antics. The South Korean president’s mother and father were killed years ago by North Korean assassins. She has not forgotten. In every recent incident, the South has suffered more casualties (when there were any) than the North. The general South Korean attitude seems to be, “We’re not going to take it any more.”

What can South Korea do? Invade North Korea.

Yet another warning about the risks created through the arrogant foolishness of the US playing globocop.

An advantage, squandered

The West won the Cold War, and thanks to arrogance and a dedication to diversity, appears to already be losing the peace:

A report leaked to The Times newspaper says that the British army would be “vulnerable” in the battlefield against Russia and that Russian President Vladimir Putin would have a “significant capability edge” in state-on-state warfare.

The Times revealed the report, which was produced by the British army, on Wednesday. It warns that the UK and its NATO allies are “scrambling to catch up” with Russia, which enjoys significant advantages in pretty much every key aspect of warfare.

Specifically, the report explains how Russia’s arsenal of weapons — which includes rocket launchers and advanced air-defence systems — are much more powerful than what Britain’s military has at its disposal.

Even major developments Britain has planned will not match up to Russia’s firepower. A planned £3.5 million ($4.6 million) fleet of lightly armoured vehicles will be “disproportionately vulnerable” to Russian rocket fire in a warfare scenario.

It is not just physical warfare in which Moscow has a clear edge, the report says. Russian intelligence has mastered the art of hacking and disturbing radar signals, meaning the effectiveness of British and NATO weaponry and aircraft operated using GPS navigation is under serious threat.

Of course, given the way in which Russia is now the defender of white Christians and the USA and the United Kingdom are the champions of secular diversity, these developments are considerably less worrisome than they would have been back in the 1980s.

It turns out that Sting was wrong. The Russians not only love their children too, they observably love their children, their heritage, and their nation considerably more than the English or the Americans do.

The evil of innocents abroad

Sometimes, it doesn’t turn out as well for the do-gooders as it did in the #1 bestselling literary satire, The Missionaries, as Peter Grant, South African military veteran and witness to many an atrocity in Africa, testifies:

I’ve seen this so many times in Africa that the memories are seared into my mind . . . yet the ‘innocents abroad’ keep on going there in the expectation that because they’re aid workers, they’ll be respected by the locals.  “In the event of trouble, the people we’re helping will protect us.  Everything will be fine.”  I was told that, in those specific words, by a medical volunteer in West Africa . . . two weeks before she was raped to death (including being raped vaginally and anally by multiple bayonets, after her assailants had had their fun) by Foday Sankoh’s RUF thugs in Sierra Leone.  She was an attractive woman when I last saw her.  Two weeks later, her torn, burned, sliced-open corpse was a nightmare.  I could not identify her by sight.  It took dental records and a forensic pathologist to do that.

People, if you visit a part of the world – not just Africa, but anywhere – where human life is cheap, where torture and rape are everyday occurrences, where tribal and/or religious and/or ethnic divisions are excuses for savagery and bestiality of the worst kind, then the odds are pretty good that you’re going to experience those realities for yourself.  The locals don’t care that you’re there to help them.  They don’t care about your high-minded ideals, or your purity of vision of the new Utopia you’re trying to build for them.  To them, you’re “other”.

Helping Africa is one of the very worst things any Western individual can do. Possibly the most evil individual of the 20th century is not Hitler, Mao, or Stalin, but Norman Borlaug, the so-called Father of the Green Revolution, who is credited with saving one billion Africans Indians and Pakistanis from dying of starvation.

Guess what the consequence of that particular piece of idiocy is going to be? Borlaugh’s Nobel Peace Prize will eventually come to be seen as far more ironic than Barack Obama’s.

In 1971, the population of Nigeria was 51 million. Thanks to Borlaug’s innovations and Western assistance, it is estimated that the population of Nigeria will be 400 million. The UN estimates that it will be the world’s third-most populous country, behind China and India.


With the highest rate of population growth, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. During this period, the populations of 28 African countries are projected to more than double, and by 2100, ten African countries are projected to have increased by at least a factor of five: Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia.

My expectation is that considerably more than one billion people are going to die as a direct result of the do-gooders interventions in Africa. And not all of them are going to be Africans either.

Reinventing the tank

There isn’t going to be any ground war in Russia. There had better not be, anyway:

Russian experiences in Ukraine—where both sides are using upgraded Soviet-built tanks and anti-tank weapons—have shown that despite the best active, reactive and passive armor available, a tank will eventually be penetrated. “We discovered that no matter how skillful the crew, the tank would get up to ten hits,” Pukhov said during a luncheon at the Center for the National Interest in Washington, D.C.—which is the foreign policy think-tank that publishes The National Interest—on July 26. “Even if you have perfect armor—active, passive. In one case it will save you from one hit, in another case from two hits, but you’ll still get five hits and you’re done. That’s why now you’re supposed to have some kind of Tank 2.0.”

The Tank 2.0, as Pukhov describes it, is not the T-14 Armata—which despite its advanced unmanned turret and active protection systems—is still a more or less a conventional tank design. “I know Russians are thinking about this new tank and this tank is not Armata,” Pukhov said. “It’s what we call among us Boyevaya Mashina Podderzhki Tankov [Tank Support Fighting Machine]—but in fact it’s not a Podderzhki Tankov, but which can protect itself. So there is a serious debate about it.”

Later, during a one-on-one interview at the Center the same day, I asked Pukhov to elaborate on the Tank 2.0 concept. Pukhov said that traditionally, infantry has protected tanks—particularly in built up urban areas—but given the speed of modern armored vehicles, that is no longer possible in many cases. But while during previous eras tanks were more or less protected against weapons like rocket propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles, the latest generation of those weapons can punch through even the toughest armor.

What should alarm Western planners is that the Russians are rapidly transforming their military into a much more effective one than its larger, cumbersome Soviet predecessor. In both Ukraine and Syria, both air and ground arms have proven to be very effective; the swamp-them-with-numbers approach is clearly a thing of the past.

This wouldn’t be a problem, of course, if the Bush-Obama administrations hadn’t sought to make them an enemy rather than an ally in the Third Wave of Islamic Expansion.

An NCO leaves the US Army

And none too soon, by the looks of things:

I leave the Army for good in September of this year.  My chain of command has been shell shocked that I am going through with it.  Two years ago when I first came to grips with what was happening and resolved to no longer be a part of it, there was derision and even an officer telling me that voicing my opinions about the state of the US economy and its moral failings could be considered a violation of the UCMJ for conduct “prejudicial to good order and discipline.”

When I gave my Operations NCO a copy of the book “A Distant Mirror” by Barbara Tuchman he came to me a month later stating that if there is a civil war, he and his fellow Hispanics will “have to choose sides.”

When I told my first sergeant why I would not be re-enlisting, she said “Don’t you want to re-enlist to get your 20?”

I said that I wanted to re-enlist, but I couldn’t, that my pension was nothing compared to being prepared to sacrifice my life. Then she and I went on to discuss my (your) ideas on why there was a possible collapse of the US government in the future, she went from denying the possibility to stating “Well, it all depends on what level of collapse you’re talking about,”  needless to say I was stunned.

The re-enlistment NCO refuses to talk to me, and several other mid to senior level NCOs who previously thought I was kidding have left the Active reserves for the Individual Ready Reserves.

One stated that he too was disgusted with both candidates for president and then asked me if I thought things would be so bad, why wouldn’t I stay in and try to fix things “from the inside”?  I cited the example of the Yugoslav army and how there were fire fights within units and stated that I would refuse to follow unconstitutional orders.  I then asked, “Don’t you think if one of the two candidates gets in power that either might order the power of the state to be used against their political enemies?  That’s what would be likely to START those kinds of firefights, right?”

If you’re not familiar with military culture, NCOs are the mortar that hold the whole thing together. Young officers are eminently replaceable, as new ones can be trained up in a matter of months, but the veteran NCOs that provide them guidance are not.

The fact that the NCOs are leaving is an even more damning indictment of the current US military than women being permitted to serve in combat units or homosexuals and transvestites being allowed to serve at all.

I don’t find this chilling, though. I find it a somewhat positive sign. Because I suspect the American people are at least as likely to be designated the enemy by the US government one day as the Russian or Chinese militaries. And the prospects for We the People’s will be considerably better if most of those veteran NCOs are on the side of the nation, rather than serving the government against them.

We’ll make it up on volume

Steve Sailer observes that Muslims serving in the US military have been a net negative since 2000:

As far as I can tell, 14 Muslim-American U.S. soldiers have died in this century versus 15 American soldiers murdered in a couple of terrorist attacks by Muslim-American U.S. soldiers.

Okay, so we’re losing soldiers on each one. (Never mind 3,000 dead civilians in the U.S.)

But we’ll make up for it on volume!

But that’s not the point. The point is that global empire costs a lot of money, which lines a lot of pockets around the Beltway, so we need to keep the Invade / Invite perpetual motion money machine going.

The Khizr Khan story was pretty good rhetoric for the Democrats. But it was hampered by the fundamental weakness of rhetoric that is used to sell falsehoods rather than the truth. Of course, one can’t effectively counter rhetoric with dialectic, although Trump could have been even colder than he was in pointing to the silence of Khan’s headscarf-wearing mother.

The more effective rhetoric would have been to point out that Khan’s death likely saved American lives, as he was killed before he experienced an attack of Sudden Jihad Syndrome and turned his guns on his fellow soldiers. The outrage would have been epic and would have served to underline the fact that even some who wear the uniform and are sworn to defend the US Constitution are not, and never will be, Americans.

Criminality and the culture of victimhood

Brings the Lightning author and former prison chaplain Peter Grant draws a connection between the various dyscivilizational organizations active in America today and the criminal mindset:

Each of the organizations we’ve discussed above is trying to exploit the concept and culture of victimhood.  They claim to identify (and identify with) various classes of victims, and seek to mobilize them (and their sympathizers) to agitate against the system that has allegedly made them victims.  If there were no culture of victimhood – if, instead, the focus was on individual responsibility – these organizations would collapse.  Only by denying individual responsibility, focusing instead on groups and the social contract that has until now governed their interaction, can they establish their own reason for being.

This is startlingly reminiscent of the criminal mindset.  I wrote about this in my memoir of prison chaplaincy.  In it, I pointed out a number of characteristics of the criminal’s outlook on life, including the following:

    3.  Refusal to accept responsibility. The criminal avoids or evades any acceptance or admission of guilt or responsibility. Even when he displays contrition about his actions, it’s usually an outward show. In reality his only genuine regret is that he was discovered. He’ll blame anything and everything, anyone and everyone except himself for the negative consequences of his crimes. Of course, this means that he’ll eagerly agree with those blaming factors in his background for his crimes — it allows him to slide out of accepting any personal responsibility for his actions. It’s always someone else’s fault.

    . . .

    6.  A need for excitement. The criminal ‘gets a kick’ out of what he does. Even getting caught has its own thrill. Dealing with the arresting officers (perhaps including an exciting car chase that gets him on TV), establishing his place in the hierarchy in the jail, dealing with the courts, trying to ‘beat the rap’: all have their own emotional intensity. The same applies to life in prison. A really hardened convict may spend more time in the Hole than in general population, aggravate and infuriate staff, annoy other inmates… but he doesn’t care. He’s getting a kick out of his ‘power’ to make others react to him.

    . . .

    10.  A refusal to accept reality. Reality is defined by the criminal on his terms, not by the victim of his crime or by society. A criminal convicted of check fraud will adamantly deny that he’s a thief — he ‘never took anything’. One who stole from a bank didn’t steal from an individual, only an institution, and that’s not theft by his lights. A rapist didn’t do any harm to his victim — ‘she enjoyed it’. A child abuser wasn’t abusing the child at all: he was ‘showing his love’ for his victim. An armed robber who killed his victim when he resisted wasn’t guilty of murder. If his victim had complied with his demands he wouldn’t have died. He ‘asked for it’ by resisting, therefore his death wasn’t the robber’s fault. Most criminals will argue that they weren’t convicted because of what they did, but rather because ‘the system’ or ‘the judge’ or ‘the prosecutor’ was against them. It was personal bias that put them behind bars, not the weight of evidence. I could go on forever in this vein, but I’m sure you get the picture.

Do you see any common ground between these characteristics, and the attitude and conduct of so many progressive pressure groups such as Black Lives Matter, Moveon.org, Common Dreams, Color of Change, and so many others?  I certainly do.  Almost uniformly these groups deny (or don’t even mention) the need for individuals to accept personal responsibility for their lives and actions.  They’ll blame anything and anyone else.  It’s “the system”.  It’s “the police”.  It’s “racism”.  It’s never the individual’s fault, never the fault of the group complaining about oppression.  It’s always someone else.

They also appear to demonstrate a real need for excitement, to make “the Man” respond to what they’re doing.  They’re social gadflies.  They never achieve anything themselves – at least, I’ve never seen anything they’ve managed to build.  They merely cause trouble for those they oppose.  They tear down what others have built, but offer nothing concrete with which to replace it.

Finally, they certainly appear to refuse to accept reality.

These organizations are evil, but they continue to grow in power and influence because no one in the West these days is willing to actually fight evil. Fist-shaking and the occasional denouncement is about as far as it goes. But as the Bible says, there is a time for peace and a time for war. We have already entered the latter, although at this point, any Man of the West who dares to take action will receive considerably more criticism from his own side than praise and support.

The West is not yet desperate enough. Neither the Men nor the Women of the West are truly cognizant yet of the existential threat to them. They don’t fully believe the situation is what it is, and are still hoping that the system will, somehow, magically start working again.

But it won’t. As Dr. Pournelle has repeatedly written, there will be war.

The hero of Nice lives

I’m glad to learn that the courageous motorcyclist who attacked the truck in Nice survived; I didn’t realize that he was actually helped stop the truck in the end. It had been assumed that he’d been killed due to the scooter under the truck, but it turns out that the scooter was thrown there intentionally.

A hero motorcyclist has told of his frantic bid to stop ISIS truck terrorist Mohamed Bouhlel by trying to jump from his bike and onto the lorry as it ploughed at high speed into crowds in Nice. In an act of astonishing bravery, Alexander Migues sped his bike alongside the 19-tonne truck as Bouhlel ran over 84 people watching fireworks on Bastille Day.

Speaking for the time, he revealed how he leapt onto the moving death machine and clung on as he tried to wrestle the driver’s-side door open several times as the truck sped along the promenade.

‘I saw the truck rise (over the median strip) and run over a lady, he told Nice Martin. ‘He was on the sidewalk and then he returned to the road and he tried to run me over too. It was instinctive, I cannot even explain how I managed to go chasing a truck. When I saw that he was really determined, I tried something,’ Migues said

Despite his bravery, Migues was forced to abandon his attempt when the terrorist pulled a gun on him. The Frenchman has been credited with saving lives by slowing the truck enough to give another motorcyclist time to throw his scooter under the wheels of the lorry.

‘He arrived in a scooter and threw it under the wheels of the truck to stop. I let go of the door and when the scooter tapped the truck I heard the noise of bullets,’ Migues said.

He said he wished he could have hung onto the truck longer and slowed it more so that victims would have had more time to flee its deadly path. But he can take comfort that the time when the scooter went under the truck to when the police engaged in a firefight there were no more killed.

In one of the non-fiction articles that will either appear in RTRH 2 or TWBW 11, the special forces author recommends that the best way to survive an urban attack is to adopt an attacker’s mentality, to move, and to act without hesitation. Alexander Migues is an exceptional example of a man who did just that.

And if Migues hadn’t forced Mohamed Bouhlel to deal with his attempts to get into the cab, Bouhlel would not have slowed down enough for the scooter to stop the truck.