Happy Memorial Day
As we remember our fallen servicemen and servicewomen today, we should also take time to be thankful for the fact that we have a civilian-controlled military in this country and that our country’s top admirals, air marshals and generals are not sociopaths such as Col. Ralph Peters. Here is Crazy Ralph’s latest essay in which he enthusiastically condones launching military attacks against journalists who posit negative opinions on our country’s foreign policy:
The killers without guns
While the essence of warfare never changes—it will always be about killing the enemy until he acquiesces in our desires or is exterminated—its topical manifestations evolve and its dimensions expand. Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media.
While this brief essay cannot undertake to analyze the psychological dysfunctions that lead many among the most privileged Westerners to attack their own civilization and those who defend it, we can acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that, to most media practitioners, our troops are always guilty (even if proven innocent), while our barbaric enemies are innocent (even if proven guilty). The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion—were any additional proof required—that human beings are rational creatures. Indeed, the passionate belief of so much of the intelligentsia that our civilization is evil and only the savage is noble looks rather like an anemic version of the self-delusions of the terrorists themselves. And, of course, there is a penalty for the intellectual’s dismissal of religion: humans need to believe in something greater than themselves, even if they have a degree from Harvard. Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar.
This is really good stuff, and it’s only going to get better:
Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours. Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.
If I had to sum up Peters’ views in one sentence, it would be this: “Freedom is so precious that we must eliminate it in order to preserve it.”
UPDATE: A commenter over at Roy’s place accurately describes Peters’ master plan:
The ultimate endgame for the General is to be the last man standing…on the planet. His story is bound to conclude bleeding to death in a mall or college campus, surrounded by police, dead civilians all around him. I just hope I’m not in the same town he is when the psychopath snaps and starts unloading his ammunition into the pansies that try to resolve problems with their “pretty words” and “book logic.”
Old news. Missed Gulf War I, did we, Ralph?
Brad, pic on the gay marriage post needs replacing.
humans need to believe in something greater than themselves
I got nothing.
@Righteous Bubba – y?
future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.
????
I am reminded, for some reason, of the scene in Stephen King’s novel “The Stand” where a platoon of soldiers breaks into the studio of a talk show host, and in an effort to silence him, machine gun him.
Of course, then the soldiers frag their own lieutenant.
It’s the wrong guy. See the thread.
Can the media personalities he describes be given names, so that, in the immortal words of Arthur Miller’s John Proctor, we may find them and join them?
PARRIS: There is a party in this church. I am not blind; there is a faction and a party.
PROCTOR: Against you?
PARRIS: Against him and all authority!
PROCTOR: Why, then I must find it and join it.
I find it interesting that after years of the most supine media possible serving conservative interests in both selling and supporting the war in Iraq, this still isn’t enough for the likes of Peters. For him, not even the slightest hint of dissent is allowable.
He is a dangerous man.
Fixed, thx.
For him, not even the slightest hint of dissent is allowable.
I don’t even think it’s that — Peters just likes the idea of killing people who read books.
Can’t be arsed, but there must be a sci-fi story somewhere that involves calling in an air-strike or artillery on the NYT bldg. or something equivalent.
Besides A. Coulter’s wish that Tim McVeigh had driven his Ryder truck to the NYT bldg., of course.
Speaking of Memorial Day, if they killed Pat Tillman, they’d probably off a correspondent w/o thinking twice.
Just the first paragraph of this bastard’s piece exposes it all. Sickening, & of course wrong, stupid & counter-productive.
Oh well, beats working.
…the essence of warfare never changes—it will always be about killing the enemy until he acquiesces in our desires or is exterminated…
These clowns always intone statements like this with paternalistic smugness, as if it weren’t THE MOST OBVIOUS FUCKING THING IN THE WORLD.
Thanks for the entertainment.
Was it my link that inspired this post? *heart*
And there, like the Highlander, CAN BE ONLY ONE Ralph “Fukkin’ ingrateful towelheads!” Peters. I checked with Teh Great Gazoogle and he confirmed it.
as if it weren’t THE MOST OBVIOUS FUCKING THING IN THE WORLD.
Yeah, and somehow – even though they acknowledge that war is a shitheel exercise in domination / oppression – it’s all manly and noble and stuff. It is queasymaking.
Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar.
Not a good idea to invoke explicitly religious-revival Old Testament-y phrases* and then accuse the neo-pagans of worshipping at a bloody altar.
* “God of their Fathers” turns up particularly often in II Chronicles, for some reason.
…the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar…
I’m not sure if I’m spelling this right, but…??!?!???!?
Pandaguns?
While this brief essay cannot undertake to analyze the psychological dysfunctions… he could SO TOTALLY do it if he wanted to. No one has a clearer-eyed a view of each and every one of his fellow men and all that motivates them than Ol’ Blood and Guts Peters.
Oh!
You don’t think maybe “neo-pagans” = “JOOOWZ” – could it be our lil’ JINSA boy is actually suggesting THOSE PEOPLE WHO OWN EVERYTHING are all behind this? That’d throw a discarded sabot into the works fersure.
ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.
Sure, seeing as how their whole infiltrate and depose scheme didn’t work out as planned.
media infiltration linky.
blah,blah,etc,etc,
I see. Another endtimer’s novel. Well, no wonder he brooks no dissent what-so-ever! It gets in the way of their plans for the fullfillment/hastening of their rapturous departure from us heathen.
In my younger days these jesus freaks were ridiculed. (Insert Cheech & Chong’s “Now I’m High On The Lord” bit here.) Now they are writing for The Journal of International Security Affairs!
I don’t understand how this madness was allowed/encouraged to occur.
Done ranting. All better now!
The War after Armageddon, a novel set in the Levant after the nuclear destruction of Israel.
A whole NOVEL written in that turgid style? Ach
Nice progress, that only leaves a few pesky amendments to go and we’ll be back to the Founding Fathers’ Original Intent! (Before all those Activist Amendments, that is.)
How’s this? “Future wars may require confiscation of all citizens’ guns, enforcement of a single national religion, quartering soldiers in our homes, superceding all state laws, re-establishing slavery, and rescinding women’s right to vote.”
Oh, and poll taxes and unlimited Congressional pay.
Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.
Spoken like a man who, had he been born 40 years ago on the other side of the world, would be cheering on the Soviet tanks as they rolled into Czechoslovakia.
Authoritarian cultists: they’re all the same.
Oh fer fuck’s sake. Not entirely off-topic, Bush explained to French Pres. Chirac that the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Mid-East and must be defeated.
I just want to scream sometimes. And hope for assassinations.
M. Bouffant said,
Found it!
Magog shore do make fine corn bread tho.
freedom is so important that we can’t let you appreciate it until it is gone and only then will you know what you are missing because it is too late. yoo-ess-ay…yoo-ess-ay…yoo-ess-ay
Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got til it’s gone?
Thanks for getting arsed, islamofascist. That probably is how Ralph Peters wants it to happen, no matter how much he types of manly manliness.
Chickenhawk.
If Gog and Magog are such mighty monsters, how come they never had their own DC comic? Huh?
I am more concerned about the Biblical creatures Tohu and Bohu.
Well? We’re waiting. Aw, c’mon, one of you atheists can grow a pair, can’t you?
A whole NOVEL written in that turgid style? Ach
I dunno, Red Army wasn’t all THAT bad, but then again that was from some 20 years ago.
Smut–
I beg you to reconsider. Tohu and Bohu are Israeli puppet characters on a kids’ tv show.
(Note: The above assertion is false. Fun, though.)
You are probably thinking of Nolens and Volens, the tag-team wrestlers. Their gimmick was to talk in Latin. They had a cult following in the Vatican.
does that mean that we can take out clown hall, national review and the american spectator? I’ll drive the truck if someone else gets the fertiliser.
Insert joke about copious supply of bullshit.
Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar.
Did not our fathers reject the gods of their fathers?
Fathers all the way down…
“He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow
Communistcrypto-islamo-journalist infiltration,Communistcrypto-islamo-journalist indoctrination,Communistcrypto-islamo-journalist subversion and the internationalCommunistcrypto-islamo-journalist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar.
The more I read it, the more I realize that no sane person can write such a sentence. It reads that like last sentence of a letter left by a high-school shooter.
An earlier version of Ralph Peters.
(German nationalist warmonger General Friedrich von Bernhardi, from a century ago.)
He is the author of 24 books
I really ought to start sending some of my stuff to publishers. If Ralph can get published, I reckon anyone can. :/
Sounds like it would be about as much fun as Orson Card’s Empire.
If you can make it through two chapters of that, you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.
ftfy
I’m not convinced he’d be leading them. More likely he’d be a tough-talking party bureaucrat in charge of shoving confessions in people’s hands and telling them to sign them, “just as a formality”.
(I just say The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, can you tell?)
Shit. That’s SAW.
Just saw it, that is.
Yup, somebody’s been fluoridating Peters’ water for a long time.
Does ol’ blood’n’guts not see his self-cancelling logic?
If there really were a strong disputatious media, this whole permanent state of war thing wouldn’t even exist. Ergo, there’d be no bloodthirsty, all-powerful enemy to coddle, no existential threat for his imagined weaklings to appease, no canvas of ‘reality’ for Ralph to splash his apocalyptic ravings on.
So many public outbursts of stupid in one day. How is it these freaks never get a Mr. Magoo eyes-open moment and say, “Did I really publish that atrocity? Holy shit, now I’ve got egg all over my face, one foot standing in dogshit and the other in my mouth. I need to move to a medium-sized city in one of the rectangle states, get a non-descript job in a suburban office park and never, ever write another word”.
Rupert Murdoch ventriloquist’s dummy Ralph Peters has always been one crazy ass puppet but… “neo-pagans”?
Made it into Ch. Three (OK, a little skimming, it’s fucking awful) but felt I should share this. Dunno if “Cole” is the hero or his sidekick, but:
There’s half the wing-nut ethos.
I must also mention Ralph’s brilliant Future History The War in 2020
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_in_2020
Watch out Whitey! The Mexicans, Muslims and Japanazis are comin’ to get ya!
America’s most cherished value is the freedom of speech and the press. If Crazy Ralph is hostile to it, by definition he’s anti-American. A traitor, even.
Hmm, this jar on the mantle is a bit uncomfortable, y’know. A little cushion in here might be nice.
This guy is an object lesson that what Pol Pot did in trying to kill everyone with a better than grade school education could happen in the US, if people like this guy were ever really in power. Psychos like this are around.
Also, the US military did attack journalists. They have attacked Al Jazeera twice, in 2001 and 2003, and then during the Iraq invasion, a tank fired a round into the Reuters bureau, in a building full of foreign journalists, claiming they had been recieving sniper fire from that building. The CPJ counts sixteen journalists killed by US forced in Iraq (they do not claim to know these were intentional), and Robert Fisk recounts the Reuters incident.
Hey, Smut Clyde, wasn’t Magog a character in DC’s Kingdom Come? I guess that elevates his status. No wonder Junior Bush was scared.
Fortunately, he’s an ex-military officer, Mad Ralph, so I doubt if he’ll be able to rally the troops. Unless he’s made himself a special Army of the Baby Jesus uniform for when the shit hits the fan. Among the ways he’s qualified for writing this stuff: he’s a “world traveller”. I bet there’s some experiences of rude waiters, persistent beggers and unimaginably bad toilets that helped shaped his world view.
Can’t believe I forgot this:
We leftists have fixated on torture and wiretapping, but there are a lot more crimes in the Bush Administration crime-o-copia to choose from. It’s a buffet of monstrosity!
Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours.
Up next on FOX NEWS: a Special Commentary by Oliver North on the need of the new Administration to honor the Constitution & obey the rule of law.
Oliver North is brought to you in part by the makers of Heroin … Heroin: it’s not just for breakfast anymore!
henry lewis says,
“one of the rectangle states”
I love this. Permission to steal?
If you can make it through two chapters of that, you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.
I remain embarrassed that I even tried, but I’m happy to chill here with you.
I just want to say that I rejected the god of my fathers, but that was sacrificing a horse to Odin involves a fair bit of noise and confusion, and the neighbours complained.
What’s with this “fathers” thing? I only got one. Maybe those screaming jerks are right about kids raised by gays turning out crazy.
Hey, Smut Clyde, wasn’t Magog a character in DC’s Kingdom Come? I guess that elevates his status. No wonder Junior Bush was scared.
He was. And Gog appeared in normal-continuity Superman comics.
Aren’t they both supposed to be place names, anyway?
Place names, maybe. Or heck, they could be crazy-person adjectives from a paranoid schizophrenic on hallucinogens.