Leftist influence in the military
We started hearing reports during the Obama years of a switchover in terms of ideology in the military. Here’s an article about it (written some years later, but I recall hearing about it at the time, too):
…[T]he Army that I joined during Obama’s first term was nothing like the Army that I left it towards the end of the second.
And I think the Army, the military in general, is such an opaque institution from the outside sometimes, that I think the American people are kind of in the dark a little bit, about what all of these policy changes and cultural changes implemented by progressive activists in the Obama administration are really doing…
Well, [the Obama adminstration was] focused more on accomplishing stated social goals versus simply focusing on the military’s sole job, which is to fight and win wars.
So, I interviewed scores of sources for the book, and a number of them were people like two- or three-star generals who were in the room when these decisions were being made.
And what they would tell me is that, we never got … coming from the White House, the administration, we were never getting guidance about, you know, hey, we want to have this many brigades ready, or like, tell us the status of the troops.
It was all simply focused on, basically, things like the transgender policy or integrating, creating gender-neutral infantry. And it’s over the objections of the commandant of the Marine Corps and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
And so, basically, to pull one quote, someone said, “ … We got a lot of direction from the White House, but none of it had anything to do with war fighting.”
And I think that kind of sums it up…
…[T]he [military] academies now are increasingly run by civilian professors, rather than military instructors.
And that started during the Clinton administration, but it really expanded during the Obama administration. And I’ll get to why that’s problematic and how that plays out in a minute. But just as an example, West Point was 2% to 3% civilian professor in the early ’90s, and now it’s 25% . And now, one out of every three instructors at the Air Force Academy are civilian instructors…
You [shouldn’t] send people to West Point to become more “gender cosmopolitan,” you send them to West Point so they can prepare to lead soldiers.
It really became apparent when the story of Spenser Rapone broke in 2017. Remember him?:
Many people (me included) wondered how it was that the openly-Communist Spenser Rapone was allowed to graduate from West Point. It’s not as though Rapone was underground with his point of view as a proud Communist. And West Point isn’t Evergreen State College—is it? So how on earth did Rapone fall through the cracks?
Now the professor who had originally reported Rapone to West Point authorities (to no avail), retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert Heffington, has issued an open letter to West Point graduates with a word—actually, many words—of explanation…
So now we have Matthew Lohmeier:
The Defense Department relieved Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier of his command of the 11th Space Warning Squadron at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, CO, due to comments made on a podcast about Marxism spreading in the military.
Lohmeier told Sean Hannity the Marxism spread is not a recent development. It’s been happening for years.
Yes. If you’ve been paying attention, you know.
More:
I made that very clear to my own people that in light of a hyper politicized environment that I’ve seen since taking command and I’m no longer in command, I will not tolerate any discrimination of any kind based on politics, for example. So let me give you one example of what I saw in the past ten months when I was in command of the unit. There were videos sent out to every base and service member that we were asked to watch in preparation for our extremism down days and discussions on race in which we were taught that the country is evil and founded in 1619 and not 1776 and that whites are inherently evil. And so I speak up against those things in my book.
As for the question of whether Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Training (which is what Lohmeier is describing here) are actually Marxist, please see a discussion in yesterday’s comments that begins with this comment and link from “Art Deco.” My reply can be found here. Then that was followed by this and this.
The corruption of the Pentagon by leftist ideology is, after the indoctrination of millions upon millions of schoolchildren by BLM/CRT/1619 propaganda, perhaps the most troubling element of the illegitimate Harris/Biden administration; thankfully, Tucker Carlson has been covering the insanity at the DoD quite frequently (e.g. the incompetence of Lloyd Austin and the racialized madness of the newly-installed Bishop Garrison). To what extent this insanity can be ascribed to Marxism is an interesting and endlessly debatable question, as many take exception to the imperfect term “Cultural Marxism”; what is beyond question is that the paradigm within which this kind of indoctrination operates is based upon language and methodology borrowed from Marxism (the Leninist Who/Whom?, the dichotomy of oppressor/oppressed, the relentless assault on a traditional order and on established values and customs, etc).
General Susan Helms should have been the warning about this.
The retirement of USAF Lt General Susan Helms was driven by the political interference by Claire McCaskill.
Helms was a crew member on five Space Shuttle missions and was a resident of the International Space Station (ISS) for over five months in 2001. While participating in ISS Expedition 2, she and Jim Voss conducted an 8-hour and 56 minute spacewalk, the world record for the longest spacewalk (and the longest spacewalk for a woman).[2] Helms officially retired from the United States Air Force in 2014.
Why did she retire ?
In 2013, Helms was nominated by President Barack Obama to become vice commander of the Air Force Space Command. Senator Claire McCaskill placed a permanent hold on the nomination because Helms had dismissed a charge of a sexual assault and punished the accused on a lesser charge leading to his dismissal from the USAF, in her role as the General Court-Martial Convening Authority, who is required to review all findings.[7][8] As Helms’s lawyer explained, Helms felt the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.[9][10] Obama eventually withdrew Helms’s nomination and she retired from the Air Force in 2014.
Helms reviewed a case as CG at Vandenberg AFB. Two couples, all officers, were out on a date. The female member of the couple on the back seat accused the male of sexual assault. The couple in the front seat had not noticed anything. Eventually, an overzealous AG recommended dishonorable discharge for the male officer accused. General Helms did not believe the charges warranted such a severe penalty and allowed him to resign his commission.
For that, her assignment as CG of the Space Command was revoked by Obama. Her record of professional achievement was ignored.
Once they have in place loyal officers and also in the non-coms, then the military is under their control. Next they come after the civilian population as they can then back it up with the military. We are in the middle of a quiet takeover of the US and 50% of the citizens don’t’ recognize it because they are just happy as pigs in shit that the Orange Man is gone.
If we ever get a Republican President again, then LtCol Allen West, current chairman of the Texas Republican Party, for Secretary of Defense. That is a big “ if”.
colonel west, I actually met him at cpac, a long time ago, he was thrown under the bus by the florida legislature, and defamed by michelle fields,
I think the word for this fellow is zampolit, political officer
https://www.revolver.news/2021/05/bishop-garrison-pentagon-hatchet-man/
“The Pentagon is planning to ‘continuously’ trawl the social media accounts of military personnel for extremist behavior and views under a pilot program”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9591775/Pentagon-trawl-military-personnels-social-media-extremist-activity.html
SecDef Austin’s combat-command career was centered on those very notable (sarc) American achievements in post-war Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now vigorously degrading our military into Rainbow country, a place for all genders, LBGTQ-friendly, just a happy place, and vigorously anti-white to boot.
Well, General (ret.), it ain’t gonna work. Your troops just ain’t gonna buy it.
Blacks who command whites without remembering that blacks are only 13% of the population are making a grave historical mistake. In the past 50 years they have gradually forgotten how important it was and is to get along with The Man. They are one of the major stimuli, with their “own cultcha”, of the fragmentation of our society into smaller and smaller groups, each group set against the others. Why is it that most blacks today can be identified as black just by only their speech, being fully integrated for two generations now? 2nd generation Italians don’t have the same problem; they speak regular – accented English.
The resentment is slowly, quietly building. Voluntary re-segregation will do them no good, since their median incomes will remain lower. Their best hope is to stop being Ja’amals, and become Johns.
Either acceptance of 1984 or rebellion and civil war or a coup by the military. Those are the choices the Left and its political arm the democrat party are driving us toward.
Fanatics never count the cost of what they seek and in the aftermath, it’s always the fault of someone else.
Never forget that the left would have no power were ‘moderate’ democrats not enabling them. Being played the fool has an expiration date, willful blindness to being played the fool eventually becomes collusion. We’re very close to that point.
I’m a veteran, having served in the Marines in the first Gulf War. My father was a Marine and gave his life in service to the US. I have advised both my military-aged sons to not even consider service in this day and age. Kind of a sad state of the current environment.
I had the chance to serve well beyond my 20 year mark back in 2008, being a senior SNCO. I agonized over the decision, since I had always said I was only going to do 20 and then move on. When it became clear early on that the media was going to install Obama, my decision to stick to my original plan was easy.
I knew who he was and what he was going to do, and I wanted to part of it.
Had a talk recently with a retired CPO – about 55 years old. His last sea duty was the Chief Corpsman on an oiler that did a six month deployment in the Middle East and Med. Because oilers are “noncombatant” ships they tend to have a large number of female sailors. The had 120 on this ship. 73 of them got pregnant and had to be detached and airlifted back to the states. This CPO said the ship was unofficially dubbed “The Love Boat.” They had a hard time staying operationally up to snuff because they were short of crew or breaking in new crew all the time. It is madness to send healthy young men and women on a ship at sea for extended periods of time. Only fools would do such a thing.
The political fools that think they can re-engineer the military into some kind of social justice experiment are endangering our country. We need our military to focus on destroying the enemy, not on gender or racial “equity.”
Would be bad enough if it were only the DOD, but it is the CIA as well. “Serve” the country and it will pay for your gender reassignment. Be all that you can be (X,Y, or ZE). Why be an Army of one, when you can be many (and not have to pay for it)?
Regarding the “Marxism” thing, I agree with Neo, and I believe this essay is on point:
https://lawliberty.org/purging-whiteness-to-purge-capitalism/
As is Ludwig von Mises’ point from the Preface to the 2nd English edition of his 1922 book Socialism:
The great ideological conflict of our age must not be confused with the mutual rivalries among the various totalitarian movements. The real issue is not who should run the totalitarian apparatus. The real problem is whether or not socialism should supplant the market economy.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/kahane-socialism-an-economic-and-sociological-analysis
Hayek has a nice Forward to that Socialism book from 1978, if you press the Facsimile PDF button there (not in the HTML version).
In Mises’ Preface to the 2nd German edition, he talks about Utopians of the early 19th century versus the Marxists (pages 5 and 6 of the PDF). Communism was supposed to be inevitable, but it turns out the “working class” did not expropriate the expropriators.
Mises first made his economic point in his 1920 essay, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth:
https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth
Hayek makes his argument against central planning in this 1945 article in American Economic Review, The Use of Knowledge in Society, and refers to Mises’ 1920 essay near the end (click EBook PDF):
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/hayek-boll-12-f-a-hayek-the-use-of-knowledge-in-society-1945
This stuff isn’t easy, IMO, and there is more elsewhere. It takes time and effort to understand. Just one example, though, someone like Barack Obama I would have to think is virtually clueless about such matters.
Mises argues that without market prices a rational allocation of producer goods among competing interests is impossible.
As my professor for graduate microeconomic theory put it, who got his PhD under Paul Samuelson at MIT, so highly mathematical and a little off-point though it implicates all his equations I suppose, worldwide communism would never work. You would would have to have at least one free market economy, say New Zealand for example, so you would have some idea what prices to charge.
Hugo Chavez was military- nor was he the first example in Latin America of a lefty milico. (military man). Marmaduque Grove, a member of the coup that brought Chile a Socialist Republic for 2 weeks back in the ’30s, was related by marriage to Salvador Allende’s family.
Hugo Chavez and his successor Maduro made sure that Chavista officers got promoted, and those opposed to him got an early retirement.
Giving all those goodies to the upper ranks- though enlisted men may be short on rations- insures that those in command stay with the Chavista program.
Mises wrote his 1920 essay to convince one of the two Ottos (I don’t remember which, both are mentioned in Hayek’s Forward to the 1922 book I keep referring to), a socialist who also participated in Bohm-Bawerk’s seminar — not to lead-participate in a proposed communist revolution in Vienna in 1919 — that it would never work.
Another seminar participant mentioned there is Joseph Schumpeter, Mises’ friend and contemporary in Vienna, who would later supervise Paul Samuelson’s PhD at Harvard. (Samuelson was still predicting in his 1985 edition of his introductory economics textbook, the best-selling of all time, what year the Soviet economy would be larger in size than the U.S.; a date he kept moving back; the Berlin Wall fell not long after that edition.)
Conditions in Vienna in 1919 were outlined in the third segment from this list of YouTube videos, including Mises’ part, as part of a 2002 PBS documentary, Commanding Heights:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLROP0T_I8IA-gvxyaI6wMS6EPAK9n0WxJ
The segment preceding that, the second, is on Keynes and Hayek. The full episodes from that documentary are available elsewhere on YouTube (not segment by segment).
This documentary was in a way to show how Mises’ and Hayek’s side in the end prevailed in the “socialist calculation debate” to give credit where credit was due, that Mises’ 1920 prediction proved true. Another example was a long article in The New Yorker on Hayek, who unlike Mises, was still alive to see this.
The French did this prior to WW1. The politicians wanted a politically reliable army to use aganst their opponents. Alas, when WW1 started the Germans slaughtered the French. The politically correct army couldn’t fight. The first month of the war the French lost 250,000 men. The only thing that saved their butts was the Russians attacked in the east and the British arrived in the west.
One could hardly design a better economic system than capitalism. First of all, it is using an enormous amount of easily gathered information….information that doesn’t have to be gathered by a bureaucracy: prices. What and how much to produce? What and how much to consume? This critical information is being generated each second by millions of transactions. Each transaction is two votes and a ‘taken’ price. Each transaction yields a local new price which integrates and sums with a wide area network price. All without intellectual effort. Automatically.
The only problem with capitalism is government fiddling. It fiddles with the quantity of money in circulation and its velocity of movement and the cost of the temporary use of money (borrowing) and the taking by taxation of money for government purposes and of use of money for bribery of voters and welfare. All this causes prices to often be “made”. Made prices are not so valid as taken prices, because they don’t have as much information packed into them.
The Enlightenment has one last remaining job: remove government from its role with money. There are ways where the people can manage all the government’s present involvement with money. We can certainly create it with cryptocurrencies. And we can establish interest rates controlling its borrowing and we can generate prices all by ourselves.
Of course, the government would go delirious if the people excluded it from anything to do with money and we would have to fight a terrific political conflict to get this done; this battle might take hundreds of years. But there really is no natural right or intuitive sense that government should be directing the monetary life of its people.
After all, the banks are doing some of this now by their lending via the fractional reserve system. When they lend they add an imaginary sum to the borrowers account, hoping that this will be repaid. In the meantime they have created money and the government has not been involved. And we, ourselves, create money whenever we create a good or service which someone buys. The Fed senses this increment of new economic activity and tries to add to the money supply to match this by buying Treasury bonds (or printing money if these bonds are not available.)
So, if we start a new business and the public likes its offerings and purchases its product, we are creating money. There is no reason given by God that says the government has to be involved.
The key job is to try to match the total goods and services transacted by the amount of money needed to do this. We can do this ourselves without the government.
Seems odd that this isn’t mentioned much, but – didn’t this Lt. Colonel write and publish a book on the topic? And then he commented extensively on this podcast? Isn’t that kind of thing, political involvement and political advocacy, disallowed while on active duty, especially for a senior officer? I’m not sure the military was acting without reasonable cause here, or that the Lt. Col. was unaware this was probably coming.
Not that I’m pleased with the current agenda to intentionally gut the military by requiring jingoistic alignment to socialist or other fads in social engineering that are going through the courses these days. Nor do I condone with the ‘March through the Institution’ change in directives and personnel that has been ongoing since Obama years.
dnaxy on May 19, 2021 at 1:57 pm
I generally agree with your comment, and especially your last sentence, but might suggest a small change in wording in a few spots where you use the word money instead of wealth.
As you recognize, money is a marvelous invention for exchange beyond barter and as a store of value between exchanges. But it is essentially an “agreement” within a society and to maintain trust in that agreement, we have historically looked to government to provide that control. We like this invention and the flexibility it offers so much that we will put up with an awful lot of value gaming distortion by whatever sovereign has demanded or been given the role of money manager. If government is failing in this role (and it clearly is) then a digital cryptocurrency has to be able to provide nearly “iron clad” protection against being hacked while still providing for a way to grow the money supply in concert with the wealth encompassed by the goods and services you mention. Not sure that I trust such hack resistance is viable long term (with quantum computing, etc.) and of course the government could make its use illegal unless their stewardship got so bad no one trusted them anymore either.
It took me a long time to understand how banks can create money out of thin air without any commodity or “hard money” to back it. I am still not entirely sure if they can do this without limit on their own initiative, or if the reserve account requirements with the Fed, or whatever, provide some limitations. Presumably they self-limit to the extent they believe the borrower is sufficiently credit worthy to pay them back eventually. Unless they can pawn a weak portfolio unto some other sucker instead.
More links if anyone is interested.
American Experience, The Great Famine (PBS, 2011) a one-hour show on the Russian famine and U.S. relief efforts in 1921-22. PBS AE has a webpage, but I don’t believe you can view it there (even with Passport, if you are a member). I just watched a free version here:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7w7dzr
From trying it here, I’m not sure this link will take you directly to this video there. I found it again by searching “the great famine pbs” in DuckDuckGo.
A nice collection of Hayek essays from a 1947 book, Individualism and Economic Order (free PDF):
https://mises.org/library/individualism-and-economic-order
The book includes The Use of Knowledge in Society, 1945 (linked above), and Economics and Knowledge, 1937. The 1937 essay was clearly influenced by Frank Knight’s PhD dissertation at Cornell (first published in book form in 1920 — Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit — which Hayek taught from as a textbook at the London School of Economics, I believe. A good PDF version is available at the Mises Institute, for free).
Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science, his great book on methodology, I don’t believe is available in electronic format (though parts were journal articles). It is in book format (but not free). When Mises talks about Utopian socialists (predecessors to Marx), I’m pretty sure he is talking about Proudhon (as mentioned specifically in his 1920 essay). But I believe he is likely also talking about French intellectuals such as Comte and St. Simon, who Hayek I know covers in this book. Mises’ methodological works are more spread out and probably harder to understand. The French intellectuals’ part (maybe half) of Counter Revolution of Science, I also recall as somewhat humorous.
Linked below is (1) the Mises Institute’s description of the CRS, and (2) Hayek’s Nobel address, touching on similar methodological themes:
https://mises.org/library/counter-revolution-science-0
The Pretense of Knowledge
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/lecture/
Mises’ 1958 address to the Mont Pelerin Society is an historical tour de force. The meeting that year was at Princeton, where American “Austrian School” economist, Frank Fetter, originally from Indiana, but who received his PhD in Germany, previously taught and was head of the department. Linked is the Best of Online Library of Liberty version, and versions from the Mises Institute (including the original audio):
BOLL #4, click EBOOK PDF (or other option)
Liberty and Property
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/mises-boll-4-ludwig-von-mises-liberty-and-property-1958
Mises Institute versions (includes original audio)
https://mises.org/library/liberty-and-property
Among other things, such as the historical development of capitalism, Mises mentions how Professor Fetter underestimated the power of the market versus democracy in Fetter’s economic principles book (1904, I think, maybe the 1915 edition too). Fetter compared voting with your pocketbook to votes in a political election. Mises’ further distinction was that minority interests are also served by the market (e.g., big and tall, not winner take all).
Here is that point from Mises’ Preface to the Second German Edition of Socialism, 1932 (the book originally published in 1922, linked in my first comment up above):
Same or similar themes as the full Liberty and Property audio from 1958: Mises 5 minute audio, 1962, intermission of US Steel Concert Hour
https://mises.org/library/wage-earners-and-employers-0
More links if anyone is interested.
American Experience, The Great Famine (PBS, 2011) a one-hour show on the Russian famine and U.S. relief efforts in 1921-22. PBS AE has a webpage, but I don’t believe you can view it there (even with Passport, if you are a member). I just watched a free version here:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7w7dzr
From trying it here, I doubt that this link will take you directly to this particular video there. I found it again by searching “the great famine pbs” in DuckDuckGo, which worked.
A nice collection of Hayek essays from a 1947 book, Individualism and Economic Order (free):
https://mises.org/library/individualism-and-economic-order
The book includes The Use of Knowledge in Society, 1945 (linked above), and Economics and Knowledge, 1937. The 1937 essay was clearly influenced by Frank Knight’s PhD dissertation at Cornell (first published in book form in 1920 — Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit — which Hayek taught from as a textbook at the London School of Economics, I believe. A good PDF version is available at the Mises Institute, for free).
Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science, his great book on methodology, I don’t believe is available in electronic format (though parts were journal articles). It is in book format (but not free). When Mises talks about Utopian socialists (predecessors to Marx), I’m pretty sure he is talking about Proudhon (as mentioned specifically in his 1920 essay). But I believe he is likely also talking about French intellectuals such as Comte and St. Simon, who Hayek I know covers in this book. Mises’ methodological works are more spread out and probably harder to understand. The French intellectuals part (maybe half) of Counter Revolution of Science, I also recall as somewhat humorous.
Linked below is (1) the Mises Institute’s description of the CRS, and (2) Hayek’s Nobel address, touching on similar methodological themes:
https://mises.org/library/counter-revolution-science-0
The Pretense of Knowledge
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/lecture/
Mises’ 1958 address to the Mont Pelerin Society is a historical tour de force. The meeting that year was at Princeton, where American “Austrian School” economist, Frank Fetter, originally from Indiana, but who received his PhD in Germany, previously taught and was head of the department. Linked is the Best of Online Library of Liberty version, and versions from the Mises Institute (including the original audio):
BOLL #4, click EBOOK PDF (or other option)
Liberty and Property
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/mises-boll-4-ludwig-von-mises-liberty-and-property-1958
Mises Institute versions (includes original audio)
https://mises.org/library/liberty-and-property
Among other things, such as the historical development of capitalism, Mises mentions how Professor Fetter underestimated the power of the market versus democracy in Fetter’s economic principles book (1904, I think, maybe the 1915 edition too). Fetter compared voting with your pocketbook to votes in a political election. Mises’ further distinction was that minority interests are also served by the market (e.g., big and tall, not winner take all).
Here is that point from Mises’ Preface to the Second German Edition of Socialism, 1932 (the book originally published in 1922, and linked in my first comment up above):
Same or similar themes as the full Liberty and Property audio from 1958: Mises 5 minute audio, 1962, intermission of US Steel Concert Hour
https://mises.org/library/wage-earners-and-employers-0