Does America Need Black Troops?

Dallas police shooter Micah Johnson

2,472 words

Let’s face it, it wasn’t that much of a surprise when a gunman was motivated to murder cops by the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter has a malignant genius. It can claim to be a liberty-loving group of citizens petitioning their government for the redress of grievances while representing a group that will never be able to connect with the wider white society. This friction will inevitably bring about violence and killing. Black Lives Matter is an attack on whites with several, interlocking strategies, including murderous violence and “non-violent” protest tactics that are designed provoke an over-reactive police response.

Black Lives Matter’s African adherents are not concerned with truth, nor are they concerned with justice. Officer Darrin Wilson turned out to be acting properly after an extensive Justice Department investigation. It is likely that Philando Castile was also killed under proper police procedures. The full story isn’t out as this article goes to print, but there is some compelling evidence that Castile was involved in an armed robbery, so the police were right to be suspicious and ready to shoot. Castile’s online presence was pro-thug life, much like Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin.

The Black Lives Matter crowd is also aided by whites in the churches and in the media. TV sermons on the Sunday after the Dallas shooting were filled with warm, gooey nonsense about sin, forgiveness, Jesus, etc. But no minister bothered to point out (or had the courage to point out) the black criminality at the bottom of it all.

Most insidious were the media images following the slayings in Dallas. Instead of pictures of Micah X. murdering police officers, this image was pushed as representative of the #BLM movement in the days after the shootings.

This is highly disingenuous on the part of the media. Armored police taking down well dressed black women was not representative of Black Lives Matter. The police are right to be equipped for battle. There had been severe riots and violence — enough that Russia declared Black Lives Matter a terrorist group. Rush Limbaugh recommended the same on his radio show. Furthermore, a White House petition requesting the US Government to call #BLM a terrorist group reached the required minimum for a response.

There is also another ingenious angle to Black Lives Matter, and indeed all African complaints: there is no solution to their problems, but their problems can be used in a myriad of ways by people wishing to gain something from society without contributing. This goes back a long way. When the Abolitionist Frederick Douglass was very old, it is said a group of blacks went to him to ask his advice on what they should do with their lives. He answered, “Agitate, agitate, agitate.”[1] Notice that he didn’t say build a great society, colonize Africa to keep away from racist whites, or build a better mousetrap. Instead, whites just get endless complaints.

Mass killings, such as the Dallas Police Shootings by highly trained combat veteran Micah X. Johnson, are a bit like flashes of lighting illuminating the layout of a darkened room. One of them is how the military intersects with a society such as America’s, with a large, intractable African problem. Micah X. is not an outlier but instead fits into a remarkably consistent pattern.

Black service in the US Military is consistently lied about for propaganda reasons. It is possible that blacks were in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War in small numbers, however the evidence suggests that the plurality of blacks flocked to the British cause. Virginia’s Crown Governor Lord Dunmore proclaimed that blacks siding with the British would be given their freedom.[2] At Yorktown, many blacks were with the British. Following the American victory they returned to slavery.[3]

After American independence, very few blacks were in the US Military, but all of this changed due to the massive manpower requirements of the US Civil War (1861–1865). Thousands of blacks were pulled into the Union Army. Even during the Civil War, black service was highly propagandized. William A. Dobak wrote of this in his book Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867. After the first black attack on a Confederate position at Fort Hudson, newspapers simply made up stories of black valor: “After firing one volley they [black troops] did not deign to load again, but went in with bayonets, and wherever they had a chance it was all up with the rebels.” In fact, the Native Guards “inflicted no casualties on the enemy.”[4]

Officers in the Union Army who commanded black troops were quite candid about them. Charles Francis Adams Jr., Grandson of President John Quincy Adams, Colonel of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored) regretted volunteering his men for combat duty as they were ill suited and eventually came to feel Negro uplift was hopeless.[5] Colonel Samuel Chapman Armstrong of the 8th USCT and the 9th USCT went on to found Howard University, but still didn’t believe that blacks would ever be the equals of whites.[6] Reconstruction Governor of South Carolina, Daniel H. Chamberlain, a former Second Lieutenant in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored) was also exasperated by the behavior of blacks and wrote very frankly on the matter.[7]

After the Civil War the United States continued to use black troops on the Great Plains and in Arizona in the last decades of the long running Indian War. Again, the history of black troops at this time remains steeped in propaganda. However, Black Nationalist violence, such as that of Micah X. Johnson starts in 1898, during the Spanish-American War and the follow-on counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines. In Tampa, Florida, while waiting to go to Cuba, the all black 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments “went on a rampage” after a black child was alleged to have been used for target practice by an Ohio unit.[8] In the Philippines, many blacks from those regiments went over to the insurgent side.

In 1906 members of the 25th US Infantry shot several people in Brownsville, Texas.[9] Even a more than a century ago, the same evasions, unequal weighing of evidence, and presumption of white guilt that affected the Trayvon Martin affair and the Ferguson Rioting were in full display. The essence of the case is thus:

1.  Many witnesses see black men, including some with soldier’s boots shooting in Brownsville, Texas. Several whites are killed.
2. The case was politicized from the start.
3.  President Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive on race, was faced with a crisis which he did not want.
4. Several investigations concluded that black soldiers in general had done the shooting, but there wasn’t enough evidence to conclude which black soldiers in particular had done the shooting.
5. There was a conspiracy of silence on the part of the blacks. Investigating officers found them uncooperative.
6. President Roosevelt extensively reorganized the regiment by ordering the discharges of a large number of men in the regiment “without honor.” Included were veterans of the Battle of San Juan Hill, which Roosevelt had also participated in.
7. The crisis continued with Roosevelt getting criticism from his own party led by Senator Joseph B. Foraker (R-Ohio). In the 1970s, the case became a cause célèbre, and Roosevelt’s actions were symbolically overturned by President Nixon.

This author’s military experience leads me to believe that Roosevelt was right to do what he did. First, it is important to note that the only blacks in town likely to have done some shooting were soldiers. The 1900 Census — taken before the arrival of the 25th US Infantry — shows that the population was mostly Mexican-born whites (there was no Hispanic category in 1900, and Mexicans were counted as white).[10] Any blacks would be noticed, and it would be easy to assume that they would have been soldiers from the 25th US Infantry. Second, in my military career, I know of an incident involving a soldier in my own platoon where black troops shot at another black with M-16s while off duty — the matter was likely a personal dispute — and I saw an investigation containing all-black suspects and all-black witnesses, where all blacks essentially refused to cooperate. Finally, at a Fort Leavenworth staff course which I attended, there was a specific staff training exercise problem which involved a racial incident involving “Native Hawaiians.” The answer to the problem was to extensively reorganize the unit — just like the 25th US Infantry was extensively re-organized by Roosevelt’s War Department.

Even after the Brownsville affair, there still wasn’t much soul searching on the part of American society on its use of black troops. In 1917, the 24th US Infantry regiment “went on a rampage” in Houston, Texas.[11]

During World War Two, blacks were again employed with uneven results. There is much hoopla about the Tuskegee Airmen, but even that program had its problems. The 477th Bombardment Group (Colored) which included Detroit’s future black mayor Coleman Young, never was able to be operationally ready. Its only noteworthy action was a disruption caused by malcontents attempting to integrate the officer’s club.[12] At the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California, black sailors mishandled ammunition leading to an explosion. Afterwards many blacks mutinied and refused to work. In Australia, rear echelon troops in Townsville, Australia shot their officers and then had to be suppressed by Australian troops. The affair was covered up at the highest levels by then Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson.

In Italy, the 92nd United States Infantry Division was an all-black unit with a troubled history. After several debacles it had to be reorganized with the addition of two new regiments, the 442nd US Infantry (Japanese) and the 473rd US Infantry (White). Unit histories proudly state that the Division was one of the first integrated at the regimental level, but the reason for integration was that non-black troops were needed to make a black unit functional at all.[13]

In all histories involving these uneven men, the historians split hairs, alter the weight of evidence, blame white officers, blame the training program, and ignore that the pattern of black dysfunction that is the true cause. The 92nd Infantry Division’s Commander Maj. Gen. Edward M. “Ned” Almond, wrote reports that the US should not use black troops in combat operations in the future. Whatever he wrote in an official capacity is not online, and his advice was ignored. Almond went on to command troops during the toughest days of the Korean War.

There are many, probably apocryphal, stories about Almond’s attitude towards blacks in Korea. He was rumored to have sacked black platoon leaders even if they were found competent by their peers. Yet Almond may have been correct. There was much black dysfunction in Korea. The US Army integrated at the individual level during the Korean War because black units were unable to hold together under Chinese or North Korean pressure. The all-black 24th US Infantry was a notorious disaster.[14]

The racial tensions during the Vietnam War are very well known, and it is possible that the war was lost due, at least in part, to integrated units. After the Vietnam War the army went into serious soul searching, but wasn’t able to take on the Big Lie of racial issues, except to wash out blacks with the IQ test level at the recruitment stage.

Since 9/11, there have been three major incidents of militarily trained blacks committing political violence against whites. Veteran John Allen Muhammad (1960–2009), an engineer, killed at least 10 people in the 2002 Beltway Sniper Attacks. Hasan Karim Akbar, an engineer, threw grenades and fired his rifle at the sleeping tents of his brigade’s command and staff group, killing two and wounding many others. Veteran Micah X. Johnson, an engineer, killed five and wounded 11. He said he wanted to kill whites, especially cops.

What is going on in the US Army’s Engineer Branch? It is as though the problems of the 24th and 25th US Infantry have reborn there.

Military service is an important civic duty in a republic. It also must serve a function of repelling foreign threats. But the military is a domestic institution with a domestic mission also. Several things are clear. First, all that was promised about uplifting blacks in the “civil rights” revolution of the 1960 has proven false. Second, any violent interaction involving whites and blacks has the potential to scale up to society-wide levels of violence. In the context of the second case it may be time to question whether or not we wish to arm and train a dangerous people who have large enough numbers to really cause problems.[15]

Notes

1. http://mije.org/richardprince/agitate-agitate-agitiate

2. http://www.history.org/almanack/people/african/aadunpro.cfm

3. http://www.blackloyalist.info/cornwallis-and-the-siege-of-yorktown/

4. Dobak, William A., FREEDOM BY THE SWORD: The U.S. COLORED TROOPS, 1862-1867, Kindle Location 2527

5. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/363987?uid=3739552&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21106445542383

6. http://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2015/03/being-progressive-yesterday-race.html

7. http://www.unz.org/Pub/AtlanticMonthly-1901apr

8. This author is highly skeptical that an Ohio Infantry unit used a black child for “target practice.” Participating in such a thing is cold-blooded murder, and it is difficult to believe that a military unit would be able to do this. All it takes is one NCO to say stop and the whole escapade would come to an end. The story is fantastic and strikes me as an 1898 version of the modern “hate-hoax.” http://www.tbo.com/lifestyle/black-soldiers-faced-prejudice-in-tampa-245732

9. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/pkb06

10. One of the great things about the alt-right is in addition to not being required to support obvious lies, one can also raise provocative questions. I wonder if “Hispanic” as a racial category should continue to exist. It was created by the US Census Bureau in the 1970s. “Hispanics” are white as well as other mixed races, such as mestizo. Additionally, recently in the most viciously anti-white shootings in Orlando (2016) and in Dallas (2016) Hispanics made up victims. Omar Mateen specifically spared blacks, and gunned down “Hispanics” without a second thought. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/12/481785763/heres-what-we-know-about-the-orlando-shooting-victims http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/08/us/dallas-shooting-victims/ In Brownsville 1906, Brownsville Police Lieutenant M. Y. Dominguez was seriously wounded, but the pro-black activists did not accord him any consideration for being “Hispanic.” One must also wonder if the “black and Hispanic” coalition that is supposed to take over America is a mirage. In fact, I wonder if it is more likely that whites and “Hispanics” will form a coalition themselves, becoming especially strong when immigration is ended.

11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_riot_of_1917

12. http://www.redtail.org/the-airmen-a-brief-history/feeman-field-mutiny/

13. http://www.army.mil/article/46649/

14. The all black Regular Army units the 24th and 25th US Infantry had a nearly 50 year run of highly un-even performance before integration. http://www.history.army.mil/books/korea/24TH.HTM

15. Somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but important enough to be mentioned in the footnotes, is that there is also a sub-lethal level of hostility with blacks in the service. Additionally, if white American society cannot rationally protect themselves from such an obviously hostile and incompatible group such as blacks, then any other group is free to do whatever. Protecting blacks mean that you protect Jihadists such as Major Hassan. There is also a great deal of spying and corruption on the part of Orientals. One is Edward Lin: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-espionage-idUSKCN0X80DL Lin was given a politically correct write up by the Navy earlier.