Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap.
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? "
But it's " Thin red line of 'eroes " when the drums begin to roll
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's " Thin red line of 'eroes, " when the drums begin to roll.
Kipling: Tommy 1892
One of the side effects of the Hamas attack on Israel is you aren’t hearing a lot of talk about “toxic masculinity” or microaggressions or even the horror of “misgendering” from our friends on the left.
This is as predicted by CS Lewis who wrote about pains and pleasures:
The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method…you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem.
If you’re a man insisting your a woman, or if your a person who declares themselves “nonbinary” or declares that their “pronouns” are “ye” or a BLM activist decrying white supremacy it’s very hard to declare yourself a victim of “violence” when a person refuses to call by your desired gender or pronoun or orientation or enforces the law when during the same week when men, women, children and infants are slaughtered and abused and the images of this slaughter is on every TV channel and video platform as it exposes you for the shallow self loathing narcissist that you are.
You see only in a country that is rich and comfortable and safe can you get away with and even become rich declaring yourself a victim of violence that is either in your own head or due to enforcing of laws that you are breaking.
But there is another thing that has been noticed lately, in fact I’ve noticed it myself while watching the baseball playoff. Suddenly the armed forces seem to be changing their ads, it seems that white heterosexuals males with the masculine desire to protect are in.
This is likely due to failures to meet recruiting goals in the services.
The US Army and US Marines are running ads featuring white males again all of a sudden.
I think this means we are definitely going to war.
The whole DEI scam and the left agenda is all well and good if all you need is a force for virtue signaling, but now that there is a real prospect of fighting well you need people who can FIGHT.
The only problem is, are potential recruits going to forget the Army’s war on it’s own men?
Frank Perconte:Hey this guy says he’s not a Nazi. All of Germany and I haven’t met one Nazi yet
Band of Brothers 2001
For a long time after World War Two there was an enduring myth that the French Resistance to the German occupation of their country was larger than it was. This myth was advanced for political reasons but the reality that nobody wanted to admit that the vast majority didn’t want to get involved as:
Finding basic necessities like food was a priority
It was a great way to get yourself killed
Until late in the war it seemed unlikely that the Nazi’s were going anywhere
In fact there was a great one line joke in France concerning the “resistance” that I first heard in the 1970’s I recall it went like this:
If everyone who claimed to be part of the [French] Resistance [to the Nazis] had been a member there would have been nobody left to collaborate [with the Germans].
This was similar to a phenom in Germany where you were hard pressed to find either:
A Nazi
or
Anyone who knew what the Nazi’s had done.
It brings to mind a scene in the movie Judgement at Nurenburg, not the famous one between Spencer Tracy & Marlene Dietrich but one where Spencer Tracy’s Character asks the servents at his house Mr. & Mrs. Halbestadt what it was like to live under National Socialism. After making a point of saying how apolitical they are he continues…
Judge Haywood:For instance, there was a place called Dachau… which was not too many miles from here. Did you ever know what was going on there?
Mrs. HalbestadtWe knew nothing about it. How can you ask if we knew anything about that?
Judge Haywood:I’m sorry.
Mr Halbestadt:Your Honor, we are only little people. We lost a son in the army… and our daughter in the bombing. During the war we almost starved. It was terrible for us.
Judge Haywood: I’m sure it was.
Mrs. Halbestadt:Hitler did some good things. I won’t say he didn’t do some good things. He built the Autobahn. He gave more people work. We won’t say he didn’t do some good things. But the other things… the things they say he did to the Jews and the rest… we knew nothing about that. Very few Germans did.
Mr. Halbestadt:And if we did know… what could we do?
Judge Haywood:But Mrs. Halbestadt said you didn’t know.
Judgement at Nurenburg 1961
Apparently it was almost impossible to find anyone in Germany who knew anything that was happening at all.
And that brings us to the present day and US universities:
It’s been an ironic week in these expensive bastions of learning. These are places where identifying someone by the wrong pronoun can get you blacklisted but supporting Hamas as they rape women and behead children, that’s was fine:
I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their… https://t.co/7kzGOAGwp9
Fallout from a controversial statement published and initially signed by about 30 student groups at Harvard University continued Wednesday as two trucks circled Harvard Square for much of the day, featuring the names and photos of students linked to the statement.
The billboard trucks, funded by the conservative news group Accuracy in Media, featured LED screens that changed throughout the day to feature at least a half dozen Harvard students under the words, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” The trucks also linked to a website, HarvardHatesJews.com, which directs users to send messages to Harvard’s board of trustees.
“Tell them to take action against these despicable, hateful students,” the website reads. “Each and every one of these students should be expelled and their student organizations should be kicked off campus.”
And suddenly you have all kinds of Harvard students who where going to be lawyers are suddenly resigning from the student groups and/or claiming they never read the statements before they went out. To wit:
Simple question: If these groups had signed onto a statement condoning the murder of blacks, or gays, or trans people would you still call this "harassment" or would you demand CEO's not hire any member of such a group, even if they left said group after the fact?
As a commentator at Instapundit descried this sudden Volte faca
“The lesson is that luxury beliefs vanish the instant the luxury is threatened. How much of our fake politics would turn in an instant if we didn’t have institutional enforcement and narrative policing, and everyone just had to stand on their own behind their own thoughts? What if radical chic consistently cost something? What if tenured communists had risk?”
I predict that by the end of this week students at all of these schools will be saying this.
And by April or May of next year when students get ready to graduate or apply for internships all of these students at these universities will like Germans after 1946 insist they were not political, that they did not know about these student organization or their statements. By the time we get to 2025 there will be so many students and graduates who claim to have been opposed to the statements supporting Hamas there will scarcely have been enough students left to have drafted them.
But whatever happens make no mistake. It was the prospect of future lucrative careers being beheaded over those statements not the reality of Jewish babies being beheaded by Hamas that will be the sudden cause of these denials
Spock:Captain, you took a big chance. Kirk:Did I, Mister Spock? They’ve been killing three million people a year. It had been going on for five hundred years. An actual attack wouldn’t have killed any more people than one of their computer attacks, but it would have ended their ability to make war. The fighting would have been over permanently.
Star Trek A Taste of Armageddon 1967
Our friendly neighborhood terrorists of Hamas have launched their boldest and bloodiest attack on Israel in decades and have put icing on the cake by the targeting and kidnapping of civilians, slaughtering families and killing and kidnapping not just Israeli’s but Americans and at least one German as well.
They caught Israeli intelligence completely off guard and US intelligence completely off guard as well, but that is understandable. Apparently just as US intelligence is busy going after Catholics at mass, Parents attending school committee meetings and Trump supporters Israeli spooks were more interested in going after their Prime Minister.
According to the leaked documents, an assessment attributed to a Central Intelligence Update from March 1, leaders of the Mossad “advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest against the new Israeli Government’s proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli Government.”
Israel’s cabinet invoked Article 40 Aleph and formally declared war against Hamas after the terrorist group launched the worst attack on the Jewish nation in 50 years.
Over 600 Israelis have been killed, more than 2000 are wounded, and 100 are confirmed to have been taken captive by Hamas since the war began.
This is, in my opinion a very good sign, all you have to do is watch the arab world cheering and even in America as Americas are killed and kidnapped people organizing to support Hamas publicly to understand that you can’t just retaliate a bit and defeat Hamas. You have to destroy them.
Israel in my opinion needs to prosecute this war without restraint, they also have to do it, I’m sorry to say, with the idea that all the people taken as hostages are expendable (If they get a chance to save some by all means do so but not at the expense of destroying Hamas.
And the only way to do so is to retake Gaza, annex is and give the people there a choice to stay or go.
Israel has left Gaza once, and did so without condition and this attack is the result. Israel must recognize that no amount of deals, or concessions or anything is going to change the attitude of either the Palestinians or the Arab world toward them. If the Arabs or Muslims around the world had a chance to slaughter the Jews they would without hesitation.
The only way to prevent this from happening again is to destroy their ability to make war. It will be messy and it will be horrible, but it will end the threat from Gaza once and for all.
They need to take to heart these words by General William Tecumseh Sherman
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
And those curses need to be poured out in Gaza to all those who aid abet and cheer Hamas’ actions in the same way that Sherman poured those curses on the people of Georgia and the Carolinas. What are your critics going to say that they aren’t already saying about you now? Sherman again:
“We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and we must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” The hard war was here for Georgia. “We cannot change the hearts and minds of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”
The time for mercy is after the enemy is defeated and helpless at your feet, until then the war should be fought hard until it’s won.
Until and unless Israel takes these words to heart, this cycle will repeat and they will really be responsible for the next attack that comes because it will be made possible by not destroying the ability of those who will make it when they had the chance.
There was a time I truly believed that the Admirals in the Navy cared about Sailors and were smart enough to run the Navy efficiently and effectively. Early in my career I worked in an Admiral’s office, for a person who I grew to admire and felt could effectively fight our adversaries and win.
Nowadays, I can’t find a single Admiral that I would want to follow into battle. None. I’ve seen firsthand how our current Admirals obsess over minute details on PowerPoints that don’t matter, refuse to hold civilian employees accountable, and grossly abuse the military justice system. These so-called leaders got away with this gross mismanagement by running the infrastructure built up by previous generations into the ground. Well, that infrastructure is finally crumbling, with Navy buildings and ships rusting and rotting away, and the young people that once manned those buildings and ships leaving in droves. The Navy will miss its recruiting goals by 7,000, and you would think that would cause Navy leadership to think about all the surveys in the past that pointed to straightforward ways to improve the Navy.
According to Franchetti, it will take “years” for the Navy to recover from these promotion delays, which have resulted in acting commanders leading Naval Surface Forces, Naval Air Forces, the U.S. Naval Academy, among other commands.
“As we look right now, our Navy is facing challenges all around the globe, threats from our adversaries,” she said. “We want to have the right people with the right level of experience in those positions. And as we continue to not have the confirmed people that we’ve nominated with that experience, we’re going to continue to see an erosion of readiness.”
It’s going to take “years” to recover from promotion delays? You mean delaying promotions of all the people that screwed up the Navy so far? That caused us to decommission ships from 2016? That broke our shipyards and crews? That continue to IA Sailors even today, so that they don’t get a shore duty break from arduous sea duty?
Never mind that the SOLE REASON for the hold on nominations was the DoD pushing commands to spend travel money (your taxpayer dollars) on abortion. ADM Franchetti fails to address that issue, and instead makes blatantly false statements about the effects of delaying promotions.
Which, BTW, aren’t delayed. The Senate could proceed and vote on each one individually, but that would open these people up to questioning about their past records…something most of them don’t want to do. Pesky Senators might ask “Hey Admiral, why did you run our shipyard into the ground?” or “Why did you make openly racist statements in the name of DEI policy?” These questions are pertinent, relevant, and totally undesired by today’s Admirals.
If you can, please write to your elected federal officials and tell them you aren’t happy with how the existing Defense Department Generals and Admirals ran our military, and ask them to do a bit of house cleaning. The media spins these stories totally one-sided. Much of the mediocrity in today’s military leadership cuts across party lines, so its an issue that both Republican and Democrat Senators and Representatives need to solve. Unless you write, and write a lot, its going to be swept under the rug.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. According to those agencies, everything is fine, and the Defense Department is doing a great job! Nothing to see here, move along now peasant!
