General Milley Laments

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, is going into therapy. What other conclusion can you draw from his idiotic statement, to the effect, that he is going to examine, introspectively, his white rage. 

In his words:

“I want to understand White rage. And I’m White,” Milley said, focused on learning more about the mostly White, mostly male mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America. What caused that?” Milley asked. “I want to find that out.”

It was perhaps the most idiotic statement we have ever heard from a leader of America’s armed forces. 

Of course, Gen. Milley does not much care about what caused the violent insurrection mounted by Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters. He does not much care about why America’s cities burned, why police were routinely assaulted, why government buildings were attacked, why stores were looted and pillaged, why innocent citizens were attacked on the street for the crime of being Asian or Jewish.

No, Gen. Millery does not care about that. He wants to know about his very own white privilege and white rage? 

Compared with the tens of thousands of people who attacked the government in the name of George Floyd, the hundreds who walked into the Capital were a piddling group indeed.

As it happens, the rioters who looted and burned and attacked the country last spring and summer have largely been excused by our civil authorities. Precious few of them will be indicted. Their hatred of white people has largely been explained away as a normal reaction to injustice. And yet, many of the January 6 protesters have been held in jail for months now, on the grounds that they are an imminent danger to the Republic.

As for Gen. Milley’s question, we can relieve him of his agony and spare him the indignity of searching his soul. Well, one reason must be that the generalized attack on white people, on white supremacy, on white privilege has been ongoing for quite some time. Its origins like in the Black Liberation Theology of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Those white people who are fed up with being scapegoated and blamed every time a person of color commits a crime, are simply giving back what they have been getting. 

And, let’s not forget the four years of non-stop abuse and harassment that many American leftists, joined by liberals and progressives, directed at one Donald Trump. As noted before on this blog, many people felt empathy for Donald Trump and were outraged at the treatment he had been receiving, from the media and from politicians. In a country that values free expression, silencing a former president on major social media platforms might easily provoke rage. After all, the principle of free expression values open debate, as an alternative to open warfare. If Gen. Milley were really so concerned about thought crimes, and if he had the least understanding of empathy, that would be a good place to start.

And, dare we mention, that Gen. Milley and his fellow travelers in the Biden administration have declared war on America. They are not worrying their pretty little souls about foreign enemies. They are effectively trying to appease the mullahs in Iran. They are even removing defensive missiles from Saudi Arabia, the better to punish the Gulf Arab states for doing business with Israel. They recall the halcyon days of the Obama presidency where the ISIS caliphate was enjoying its glory years. They have no problem with Islamic terrorists and they are certainly not going to compete against China over things like 5G technology. Nevertheless, they are happy to fight their fellow Americans. 

The only caveat is that, when they are not fighting against their fellow Americans-- and thus, as a matter of policy, dividing the country-- they are going to war against the weather.

And don’t you dare suggest that they are a bunch of wimps who do not know how to win wars. When President Trump told them so, in a July, 2017 meeting in the bowels of the Pentagon, they were outraged. Of late, one J. D. Vance suggested as much, and people accused him of never having fought for America-- even though he served in the Marines.

Anyway, as Glenn Greenwald explains, the American left is thrilled, to the depths of its marrow, to have a commanding officer spouting leftist academic theories. Now it can accuse anyone who takes issue with Gen. Milley of being anti-military.

Whatever else is true, it is creepy and tyrannical to try to place military leaders and their pronouncements about war off-limits from critique, dissent and mockery. No healthy democracy allows military officials to be venerated to the point of residing above critique. That is especially true when their public decrees are central to the dangerous attempt to turn the war posture of the U.S. military inward to its own citizens.

As Greenwald also notes, deciding that the white Americans are the principal threat to the nation, is preposterous and appalling.

But it is preposterously naive and deceitful to divorce Gen. Milley's steadfast advocacy of racial theories from the current war strategy of the U.S. military that he leads. The Pentagon's prime targets, by their own statements, are sectors of the U.S. population that they regard as major threats to the national security of the United States. Embracing theories that depict “white rage” and white supremacy as the source of domestic instability and violence is not just consistent with but necessary for the advancement of that mission. Put another way, the doctrine of the U.S. intelligence and military community is based on race and ideology, and it should therefore be unsurprising that the worldview promoted by top generals is racialist in nature as well.

As you know, the current Secretary of Defense has already ordered a purge of all white counterrevolutionaries. Because, nothing promotes unit cohesion than sowing distrust among the troops. 

To be fair, the military top brass, from Gen. Milley to Sec. Austin declared that they are not trying to police thought and beliefs, but that they want to police behavior. Of course, this is nonsense. And they also claim not to be teaching woke ideology. In some sense, this is true. They do not care about your beliefs; they care about the color of your skin.

At the same time West Point is offering courses in racism and gender discrimination. Such courses send precisely the message that you had best keep certain beliefs to yourself. Otherwise, before you know it, you will learn that expressing an unpopular opinion, expressing support for a certain past president, counts as action, not as a belief-- and damages your career prospects. Why else is the American academic establishment, the social media titans trying to suppress unpopular opinions and even to shut down the accounts of a certain past president.

Now the American military has declared war on thought crimes. This is not going to end well.