Counter-Currents
1,450 words
I took a rare day off on Memorial Day, but it had nothing to do with mourning dead American soldiers. Naturally, this didn’t stop me from being bombarded by the endlessly treacly and corny “conservative” online finger-wagging about how I need to honor all the dead soldiers who ostensibly shed their blood to protect my freedoms.
Exactly what “freedoms” are you talking about there, Gomer Pyle? I hardly have the freedom to speak. I have zero freedom to refuse working from January 1 to at least mid-April every year simply so the government can extort the fruits of my labor and spend it on more wars.
I can’t think of the last American war that I thought was justified, and I keep drawing blanks when I attempt to comprehend why sending young men overseas to either die or come back maimed and psychotic has the slightest thing to do with “preserving our cherished freedoms.”
About a quarter-century ago I read IRA activist Bernadette Devlin’s autobiographical The Price of My Soul, and no amount of Googling enabled me to find the first line of the book, but from memory, it went something like this: “My father went to fight on behalf of the British in [name of war] and returned home with one leg.” It was one of the most compelling opening salvos of any book I’ve ever read.
My father went to fight on behalf of “American freedom” in World War II and returned home shell-shocked and hopelessly addicted to alcohol. I remember my mother telling me of how she would pray every night — to no avail — that his drunken tantrums would cease. He drank a full bottle of whiskey or Scotch every day from 1945 until 1980. He stopped drinking a year before he died, but by then his body was too wrecked to salvage.
My brother went to fight on behalf of “American freedom” in Vietnam and also returned home shell-shocked and hopelessly addicted to alcohol. Sometime in the mid-80s, he swapped out the booze for a 12-pill-a-day habit of opioids, muscle relaxers, sleeping pills, anti-anxiety pills, and antidepressants. It sucked the soul out of the first and only hero I’ve ever had.
In early 2007 while we were eating at a Thai restaurant, I told my brother that I noticed he never actually talked about what he did in Vietnam. I asked him if he’d engaged in direct combat.
He told me that he had. As part of the Army, his role was to crouch in the jungle and start shooting in the direction of the Viet Cong, and when he and the other grunts successfully lured the gooks out from their hiding place, American choppers would come in and slaughter them right before his eyes.
And that’s all he got to tell me, because at that point, he took off his glasses, started crying uncontrollably, and muttered, “Bush doesn’t know what he’s doing to these American kids in the Middle East.”
I knew then to never ask him about Vietnam again. But years after that conversation, he still wore his “Vietnam Vet” baseball cap as some sort of misguided tribute to the war that forever destroyed his mind.
Around the same time I read Bernadette Devlin’s The Price of My Soul, I also read 1935’s War is a Racket by former Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler — who, as grim fate would have it, was born only 16 miles from where my brother and I were born. These are the first lines of that polemical tract:
WAR is a racket. It always has been. . . . It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. . . . A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
I am not sure why my father’s commanders told him he was dropping bombs on Germany, but it’s likely it had something to do with protecting our freedoms. What I’m almost certain of is that if he could have seen what America looks like in 2021, he would have preferred to wind up speaking German.
I know that they told my brother he was fighting communism over there so that we didn’t have to fight it over here, only for America to wind up far closer to communism in 2021 than modern Russia is.
If given the choice — which was a freedom I was denied, as I was never even asked — I would rather have had a functional father and brother than whatever illusory “freedoms” you claim I’m privileged to have in this country.
Can anyone explain to me precisely what these “freedoms” are? Beyond that, can you explain why you think it’s worth the cost?
The Revolutionary War was ostensibly fought as a tax revolution, but a mere decade after it was fought, George Washington sent troops into western Pennsylvania to crush the anti-tax Whiskey Rebellion.
The pro-war patriots seem to think that over 600,000 dead white soldiers were worth it to free four million black slaves in the Civil War, only for us to never even receive so much as a thank-you note from all the freed blacks.
They have convinced themselves that over 100,000 dead Americans and an additional 200,000 injured Americans justified us getting involved in World War I, but I bet not a single one of them could explain one thing that war had to do with freedom.
They appear to believe over 400,000 dead and an additional 600,000 or so wounded in World War II — which was ostensibly fought to save the Jews — wasn’t nearly enough and that we keep having to fight proxy wars for Israel up until the current day, but I bet none of them could explain a single thing we get in return or why we don’t have the freedom to criticize Jews without being destroyed.
Classical conservatism was completely against foreign interventionism. Whatever the modern GOP has morphed into has nothing to do with classical conservatism or liberty. Instead, it’s this giant rainbow-colored tumor strapped with nuclear missiles. How do these flag-waving, warmongering “conservatives” justify the post-9/11 wars that continue to cost American taxpayers over $32 million per hour?
Surely there are better ways to spend that money. One risks smearing any soldier who risked his life in the post-9/11 interventions as a sucker. Many of them appear to be people who weren’t smart enough for college but whose labor would have been much better spent fixing our highways or working in factories than blasting hajis.
And this has nothing to do with me being a peacenik. I’m obviously combative. But I don’t think many — if any — American soldiers are fighting for their own interests. They probably suffer a net loss for fighting in foreign wars. The only real wartime situation right now, as I see it, is at the Southern border. It’s an invasion. Put the troops there.
And why do we even need soldiers at this point? Just as we can get robots to flip burgers, we have plenty of machines that can turn sand into glass without ever experiencing PTSD.
I recall a great commercial they used to show in the early 70s on TV. You see an empty wheat field. Then two limos pull up. Then two men get out who are obviously supposed to be the US and Russian presidents. They start brawling in the field. The voiceover said, “This is how it should be.”
Instead, we have poor and working-class American men who are sometimes forced to offer themselves as cannon fodder because the elites who send them overseas have also sent all the jobs overseas. If there’s a freedom that should hold primacy over all others, it should be the freedom from having to risk your life — or at least your soul — to protect the interests of those who’ve never even been in a fistfight.
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
47 comments
Jim,
Open an account here:
https://archive.org/details/priceofmysoul00mcal/page/n9/mode/2up
and you can read the book online.
“My grandfather had served with the British Army in the Boer War, got a bullet in his knee, and was rewarded with a job as a road sweeper.”
Great piece, Mr Goad.
My Confederate ancestors fought to save me from becoming “American.” I only wish they’d won.
I just want to pose this question to all those people whom think their lives would have been better if the south had won the civil war. What makes you think that the southern power elite, and elect would be doing anything different than the present day power elite, and elect of the united states? I am saying that they would be doing the same things, and you would still have the same problems with blacks. After all, it was Lincoln who was going to send them back, and it was a northern conspiracy that killed him for it.
This assumes that globohomo was inevitable and is the end result of technological process. Let’s see what happens to what’s left of the resistance, in places like Eastern Europe, Russia, et cetera, before I conclude you’re right that global communism was probably inevitable.
The South was right about secession. Victory by the South would have (at the very least) delayed some of the rot to come. The South’s agrarian society was not well-suited to Empire or Imperialism. But certainly we cannot speculate exactly what would’ve happened had the USA become two countries. The South’s defeat was the final defeat of Jeffersonian small government. It’s hard not to see the wretched excesses of plutocratic industrial capitalism and expanding empire in the Yankee regime.
But in the end a Confederate victory might have been merely a postponement. Certainly the burden of black labor — absent severe controls — would have portended a difficult future for America’s only unique civilization.
lives would have been better if the south had won the civil war
Lord Acton (an English Catholic) supported the Confederacy. Why so, as he also wished to see slavery banned? Because, as Acton famously wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Therefore, he supported states’ rights over having power consolidated in Washington. He predicted that a Union victory would inevitably lead to the rise of American imperialism.
The dire consequences of that centralization continue to this day: Earl Warren stRiki-Eiking down racial segregationist laws, Roe v Wade on abortion, the Supreme Court mandating same-sex marriage, . . .
The citizens of Virginia should have been left to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted slavery in the state.
You all make good points, but I just want to point out that the Confederate struggle was not a racial struggle. The south was intellectually unprepared to deal with the growing problem of blacks in their midst (and their numbers grew everyday), blacks were playing the old game of “lying low, and building their numbers.” There had been a number of incidents of blacks rebelling, and committing massacres’, so at least a few whites in the south intimated they had to go; I have read that Jefferson Davis knew that blacks had to go. I would like to point out that there was a greater danger ahead for the south, which was the jews waiting to immigrate to the south after all the aborigines, and wild animals were tamed. The south definitely was not prepared to deal with the subversive, and conspiratorial jew–just think what the jews would have done with a black slave population to work with? Now if you tell me our situation would be better if Germany had won WWII–I’m with you, that was a true racial movement.
Someone remind me how many white people the National Socialists killed.
I thought John W Booth and his conspiracy were from the South. Maybe I am naive but this is not a difficult question in my opinion. I am not a scholar of the assassination of Lincoln.
Read “Why Was Lincoln Murdered” by Otto Eisenschiml, and “This One Mad Act” by Izola Forrester–John Wilkes Boothe’s daughter. The Lincoln assassination caused as big a stir as the Kennedy assassination did, but the jews did not have to deal with the Zapruder film, and all the media coverage–so after a few years they were able to put it at rest.
Saving Arab oil sheiks from a secular Arab dictator was not worth even one American life.
Any suggestions to parents of military age children on how to discourage their kids not to fight for a country that hates them??
Let them watch these new recruiting ads for a start. White men not wanted. (I served 11 years and wouldn’t do it again. A trade is the way to go for young men.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWo5-pFrjNg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIYGFSONKbk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkmOteNE24g
The likes-to-dislikes ratio on those things is hilarious; the Army was very wise to disable comments.
(Interesting, most often, videos say “comments are turned off,” but these don’t even have a place where comments would be.)
Those videos should open a few eyes
I’d probably forget about the CIA and other similar clown shows as well. This is what they want now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHckeZoYx04&t=5s
In all honesty though, I think trades are a great way to go. One can start their own business and hire/fire who they want, they can travel with essential skills like plumbing/electrical/cooking while also avoiding over-priced college education and their predatory loans. …
Where have all the white men gone?
Why’s there nobody to stand up for truth?
Because the system deliberately wastes us.
All those KIA’s add up.
To women ruling the world.
You guys have got to listen to the quash podcast
He has hours of material on this
He considers himself a pro white ancap
The American Civil War was provoked by goodie-goodie Caucasian negrophiles hopped-up on Christianity and Uncle Tom’s Cabin;
America’s 1917 entry into the First European War was authorized by a “peace and democracy loving” lying Liberal wimp blackmailed by Zionist Jews;
America’s 1941 entry into the Second European War was authorized by another “peace and democracy loving” Liberal psychopath who deliberately provoked an attack by Japan in order to stampede the America people, against their will, into the “real” war against Europe to “liberate” Jews;
America’s 1951 entry into a war in Korea was authorized by another “peace and democracy loving” Liberal President for the purpose of “liberating” non-Westerners from the same “godless communism” that America had allied with six years earlier;
America’s 1964 entry into a war in Vietnam was authorized by another “peace and democracy loving” Liberal President for the purpose of “liberating” non-Westerners from the same “godless communism” that America had allied with eighteen years earlier;
America’s latest entries into numerous wars around the world – all for the alleged purpose of “liberating” non-Western colored populations from the consequences of their own delinquencies – and of course to preserve global “peace and democracy” which actually exists nowhere.
In every case, it has been the doctrinaires of the Left that has dragged America into EACH of its wars. Every maimed and amputated combat veteran laying in every VA hospital in America has the Left to thank for their lot. And all in vain.
And to think that the Fathers of the original, true America – the America that began in 1787 and ended in 1861 – would have waged NONE of these wars.
My late father-in-law was a career army officer. Even my husband, while still loving and honoring his father, now openly questions what was the value of his years of ‘service.’ To ensure trannies feel safe . . . Well, he did give my husband a notsee godfather, so I guess we got some benefit.
But looking back over America’s wars, I am forced to agree with Mr. Goad. As Sabaton asks, <a href= “https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=sabaton+what%27s+the+price+of+a+mile&view=detail&mid=D2509925E497AA314D53D2509925E497AA314D53&FOR”>What’s the Price of Mile?</a>
One way to commemorate the useless wars is to raise a glass to the valiant opponent. They may very well have been fighting the good fight for themselves. The Vietnamese, Norks, Fritz’s, Iraqis… All fighting for the motherland or fatherland against heavy odds.
Becoming an empire ended any chance of the US remaining a republic.
“If given the choice — which was a freedom I was denied, as I was never even asked — I would rather have had a functional father and brother than whatever illusory ‘freedoms’ you claim I’m privileged to have in this country.”
Breaks my heart.
You know what we weren’t asked about as well? The Civil Rights Act and desegregation. 100+ million immigrants since 1965. Millions and millions of Mexicans illegally climbing the wall over many decades. The intake of millions of “refugees” (including Jews from Russia, Germany, Eastern Europe). Nobody asked us about any of this. All of it destroyed our overall quality of life and our republic.
I realize no one on this website needs to be reminded about any of this. I’m just enraged, like Jim Goad is.
We’ve got a guy from Minnesota working on our Kitchen.I asked him why they had such a great demand for Somali’s.
It took the Mid-West nice a good few seconds to respond.
I enjoyed the simmering acid of this piece. Jim should read Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo, an anti-war novel about a WWI soldier who loses his limbs, sight, hearing…gruesome, but has many poignant scenes in it. Ironically, it was published in 1939, and the government immediately censored it.
As for Memorial Day, I prefer to remember it as a Civil War holiday, not the excuse for cook-outs and military fly overs. For most Americans, war begins with WWII.
My ancestors fought on both sides in the Civil War. One was Union army, the other a Confederate bushwhacker.
I wrote this some years ago:
Memorial Day, 1988
The skies mourn in their opacity
Rain pats down like notes of a bugle.
Grandmother called it Decoration Day,
A child dressing graves made from civil war.
Of my great-great-great-grandfather Reeder;
An oral soldier, uniformed and musketed by her words,
Who fought in the Union army, suffered from fever,
Recovered to battle at Pilot Knob in 1864,
A fort scooped between breasts of earth and rock;
Men hurled at it in a day melding gunpowder and foliage
Repelled the invasion of that last Confederate autumn
Blood-staining hills named the Arcadia Valley.
Buried in his uniform, a white haired, frail man,
Asthmatic chest sunken in medaled burden.
His coffin lowered, dirt tossed over it thickly
As turbid heavens cover earth with moist ablution.
Communists like Trumbo were against the war as long as Germany and Russia had their non-aggression pact. They were all in after the pact was ended.
A nation is defined as people who share a collective identity, often by kinship and ties of blood. It’s a tribe you feel you belong to and have a connection with. It’s a larger family you identify with and would die for to defend and protect. I would say this type of society if the most natural fit for human nature.
Modern American society long ago changed into a money-driven corporation whose leaders do not identify or empathize with the people who live under their power. I strongly felt this when I was younger and of age for military service. I felt that flag-waving patriots were unsophisticated, gullible suckers in a capitalist machine that would just wipe the floor with them. The idea of military service disgusted me. I have no genuine connection to an impersonal corporation, especially one that incites hatred in minorities against whites.
Nations are meant to be identified by kinship and sense of identity – which grows out of kinship in action over generations. Anything else is fake nationalism.
A powerful piece, though I confess I don’t get this part:
“He told me that he had. As part of the Army, his role was to crouch in the jungle and start shooting in the direction of the Viet Cong, and when he and the other grunts successfully lured the gooks out from their hiding place, American choppers would come in and slaughter them right before his eyes.”
Is there supposed to be something wrong with what’s being described? I don’t understand the author’s description of, and attitude toward, the weepiness following this.
We’d better one day have choppers of our own to do the dirty work of ensuring white survival. War is coming.
Have you ever killed a man?
No. And …?
I don’t understand the author’s description of, and attitude toward, the weepiness following this.
Where did I express an “attitude” beyond wishing my brother hadn’t gone to Vietnam?
Here is the relevant section:
“In early 2007 while we were eating at a Thai restaurant, I told my brother that I noticed he never actually talked about what he did in Vietnam. I asked him if he’d engaged in direct combat.
He told me that he had. As part of the Army, his role was to crouch in the jungle and start shooting in the direction of the Viet Cong, and when he and the other grunts successfully lured the gooks out from their hiding place, American choppers would come in and slaughter them right before his eyes.
And that’s all he got to tell me, because at that point, he took off his glasses, started crying uncontrollably, and muttered, “Bush doesn’t know what he’s doing to these American kids in the Middle East.”
I knew then to never ask him about Vietnam again. But years after that conversation, he still wore his “Vietnam Vet” baseball cap as some sort of misguided tribute to the war that forever destroyed his mind. ”
Perhaps my reading skills are less than they should be, but in the context of the overall article, the use of the word “slaughter” (which has a negative connotation, usually implying moral disapproval), in combination with the description of ensuing uncontrollable crying; the comparison of Vietnam (a thoroughly just if probably needless and stupid war from the American perspective) with the (obviously author’s brother-disapproved) Iraq war (a war serving no legitimate interest of the American people, regardless of how it was conducted); the word “misguided”; and the assertion that the Vietnam war “forever destroyed his mind”, suggests an attitude on the part of the writer of extreme condemnation of the Vietnam war.
One of my uncles, a career Army soldier, served in Vietnam, for more than one tour, too. He never suffered any post-traumatic syndromes, and always felt that our involvement there was wholly justified both for Cold War reasons, and as a humanitarian effort to save South Vietnam from the horrors of communist rule. We can debate these points, of course. What shouldn’t be debatable is that, as Nathan Bedford Forrest famously put it, “War means fightin’, and fightin’ means killin'” – and that our people’s collective character must be reforged to accept this reality with moral and psychological equanimity. American choppers didn’t “slaughter” anyone; they killed our people’s enemies, as was their job and duty. Patriots should wear their Vietnam Vet hats with pride.
White nationalists should oppose wars that do not serve our people’s morally justifiable survival interests. But we should not extol or adopt a pacifist psychology. Whites need to be hardened in character, otherwise there really is no hope for us given the coming cataclysms our race will face.
Yeah, I remember all those working-class white and poor-black grunts laying down their lives to help the nonwhite citizens of South Vietnam in the interests of, um, white racial survival.
Same goes for my dad fighting the Germans to, you know, protect white racial interests worldwide.
Maybe you skipped over this part: And this has nothing to do with me being a peacenik. I’m obviously combative.
By the way, “Lord Shang,” did your Vietnam vet uncle have the guts to use his real name like I do, or was he more like you?
Hmmm, Ok, I made my points in a polite way, but I now see that I’m not the one with reading comprehension problems.
“Yeah, I remember all those working-class white and poor-black grunts laying down their lives to help the nonwhite citizens of South Vietnam in the interests of, um, white racial survival.”
Where did I say anything about the Vietnam War and white racial survival? The men who went over there were mostly just conscripts who did the honorable thing instead of draft dodging. That has nothing to do with whether the war itself was justified. Nor did I assert that it was justified (retrospectively, I tend to think it was not, if only because Vietnam was not worth ruining American lives and wasting tax dollars over). I merely noted that there was nothing objectionable about American choppers killing Vietcong, who as communists were indeed part of a global criminal conspiracy against Western civilization and the white race who built it. I’m sorry your brother was traumatized by this particular aspect of his Vietnam War experience, but there was nothing for him to be ashamed about. As noted, my Vietnam vet uncle never had the misgivings about his war involvement that your brother seemed to have. He was proud of his service, as well he and others deserved to be.
One thing my uncle did remark upon a few times, however, was how utterly useless and undependable the black soldiers were. They were not over there as he was, to serve their country, but merely because they couldn’t evade the draft. Oh, and not all the fighting men were “working class white” or “poor-black”. My family has never been either wealthy or working class; just solid middle to upper middle class. My uncle even had a Master’s degree at the time he decided on a professional military career (I think he had been ROTC or something similar in college, however).
“Same goes for my dad fighting the Germans to, you know, protect white racial interests worldwide.”
Is this meant to attribute pro-WW2 sentiment to me?? I think we should have stayed out of the European theater altogether!
“By the way, “Lord Shang,” did your Vietnam vet uncle have the guts to use his real name like I do, or was he more like you?”
That’s an amusing albeit bizarrely misplaced cheap shot. Obviously, my uncle didn’t hide behind a pseudonym in his 25 year military career. He also didn’t ever appeal to anyone for sympathy (or anything else) for having fought in ‘Nam. He didn’t act like he’d had it tougher than his dad, who fought as an air pilot in WW1 (and survived having his plane shot out from under him one time), or the men in WW2 or Korea. He was proud of his service; hated “hippy faggots” who sniveled about the war from their college campus safety; never bragged or made a big deal about his service, but definitely didn’t stay silent in the face of anyone questioning the moral justifications for the war; and, to my or my parents’ knowledge, was in no discernible way traumatized by his experience (despite the somewhat embarrassment of at one point having been shot in the hip – which caused people to say he’d been “shot in the ass”). He’s dead now, but he was always to me a model Christian, conservative, and American. A man of both Roman and Christian virtue.
As to my pseudonym, that should need neither explanation nor apology in today’s Occupied America. “Wilmot Robertson” was a pseudonym. Many of the writer names at both Instauration and American Renaissance were or are pseudonyms. A fair number of the writers here at CC use pseudonyms. That you and others can support yourselves while indulging your passion for prowhite writing and activism is great. It certainly doesn’t bother me. But many of us are not fortunate enough to be in similar positions, but rather, are deep behind alien lines, working for cowardly employers or even enemy-dominated entities, and with varying levels of family responsibilities dependent upon those working paychecks. So we are forced to be anonymous. What of it?
You’re a good writer, and probably a net-asset to CC. But reading you, I get the distinct impression that you’re more of a white populist than white nationalist. Nothing wrong with a concern for “left-behind” whites. But in the clinch, white nationalism is not white populism. The latter is concerned about what’s best for the narrowly understood well-being of present whites. The former recognizes that great sacrifices may be required of present whites in order to ensure the well-being and even existence of future whites. I don’t trust white populists who aren’t first and foremost white nationalists. It is, after all, a slippery and well-trod slope from white populism to working-class populism, from using populist appeals to corral uneducated whites into a broad movement of racial survival, to being a colorblind “anti-elitist”, one who worries more about the discomforts of working class whites, and even oriental communists and poor black grunts, than actually preventing white extinction.
American choppers didn’t “slaughter” anyone; they killed our people’s enemies, as was their job and duty.
Our people didn’t have friends or enemies in southeast Asia. What we did do is destroy Japan in WW2, a country which posed no threat to America, simply because the Japanese wanted to be the dominant power in Asia.
Same in Europe in that War, only much much more so, because so many of our people are German-descended. All four of Doris Day’s grandparents were German, for example. I recently watched her in “April in Paris” (1952) and reflected with appreciation on Doris’ amazing talent and impeccable timing, as a singer, dancer, and comedienne; and her range as a singer from funny flat inflections to elegant vocalisations. I also thought about how, less than ten years before the film was made, we attempted to destroy a whole national of people like her.
Germany posed no threat to America or England, simply wanted to be the dominant power in Europe, its natural sphere of influence. As such a power, a main objective the Germans had was to beat back the Communists, which were devouring Europe at that time. By the time AH came to power, there were 10 to 20 m dead in Russia – right next door to Germany, by the way, and not to America, England, or France .
The judeo-bolshevists also had the powerful backing of judeo-bankers (check out KM’s family tree) and were fomenting revolution and terrorism all over Europe. They also had a powerful propaganda machine in place through which to distort perception of events beyond all recognition.
Telling the truth about our past is what we should be doing for our people.
I really don’t disagree with you. I opposed US entry into the European theater in WW2. I think we should have stayed out of the war altogether. I do think the Pacific War was justified, and not merely because the Japs attacked us. But wrt US involvement in Vietnam, all communists everywhere are enemies of the West (at least, my West). Whether we should have fought at all in Vietnam is debatable; what is not debatable is the morality of killing communists, esp at that time Vietcong. There were allied to our international Bolshevist enemies, and any communist anywhere is ipso facto evil and exterminatable anyway.
I can’t reply directly to you below, so I will here. You write:
I opposed US entry into the European theater in WW2. I think we should have stayed out of the war altogether. I do think the Pacific War was justified, and not merely because the Japs attacked us.
Goading Japan into attacking the US was the ruse Roosevelt used to shut down non-interventionists in America in order to enter the war in Europe. If you’re serious about enmity toward the Communists, you should have wished for the Japanese to fight them; same as the Germans fighting Stalin in Europe.
The Japanese would have made excellent organizers of Asia, and a damn sight better allies than the Chinese then or now. Again, it’s the same as with the Germans, who were more deserving of our favour than not only the Soviets but anyone else. It was the Japanese who built the extensive Chosin Reservoir in Korea that Americans were fighting the Communist Chinese over a few short years later.
“The Good War”, in one guise or another, dies a hard death.
In Dispatches, Michael Herr describes a scene where a US gunship obliterates the area from where a VC sniper was wreaking having on GIs below. After the dust settled, the Vietnamese emerged briefly from his hole and fired two quick shots. This show of defiance was met with whoops and hollers and applause from the grunts.
*wreaking havoc*.
I’m the son of an infantryman who fought in the Pacific in WW2. The damage done to men who survive repeated close combat often reaches down to the third generation. It’s impossible to estimate how badly America’s constant wars during the past century have wrecked American culture.
Some blame the Boomers.
It’s the wars.
Thinking of Jim’s Dad and the whole WWII scam that FDR and Winston Churchill put over on everyone.
The majority of the American electorate in 1940 was “isolationist.” FDR during that Fall election season promised to keep the U.S. out of the war in Europe. “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” FDR just like Woodrow Wilson had (fingers crossed) promised back in 1916 with the first go-around. (A helpful rule of thumb for judging politicians: give the promise of a politician the same level of credibility as the email from the Nigerian Prince wanting to send you ten million dollars.) The polls told Roosevelt that he would lose the election if he didn’t make that promise – “again and again” – he knew he was going to break. Secretly, he was conniving with Winston Churchill to get us into it. The conniving Brits wanted American boys once again, “over there” to help them kill those recalcitrant Germans they’d picked a fight with. By the way, the Brits, it seems to be long forgotten by many, had declared war on Germany – not the other way around.
Most Americans didn’t want their sons, brothers and husbands getting killed to save Europeans from each other – again. They had seen Act One of Wilson’s “war to end all wars” tragedy thirty years before. “Fool me once, shame on you.” They had no interest in Act Two of making “the world safe for democracy” with Americans playing the lead role on the slaughter house stage. No matter. “Fool me twice” was furtively underway. Franklin got his “good war.” In 1940 American unemployment topped out at 8.1 million. Near the end of 1942, it was at 1.5 million. President Roosevelt had finally put Americans back to work building a vast charnel house. FDR’s toast to his military Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Make love and war.”
Woodrow Wilson and FDR — two of the worst American Presidents.
There is a strong argument that Chamberlain was shoved into declaring war on Germany, by American diplomats. The parliamentary and financial lobbying was rather unusual. CHAMBERLAIN famously asked why Roosevelt’s representatives were so keen to get the British to use Danzig as a tripwire. See Roosevelt’s European plenipotentuary William Bullitt. Why did the Poles get so uppity with German demands? American backchannels like Bullitt. Chamberlain and Halifax didn’t want a war.
I feel it is right to honor those that fought representing the US whether or not it was a cause I back. They were doing as they were directed within a military setting. Failing to follow orders serves to endanger their fellow soldiers.
My idea for use of military is to have our entire border, north, south, east and west, be a militarized zone a mile deep. Anyone attempting to breach the wall, multiple fences and sensorized zone would be shot on sight. On the sea, there would be space for enjoying the surf and water sports with a navy patrolling beyond at a perimeter. Property owners would be fairly compensated for their lands or trade for more inland federal space. This is how I see a military to be useful as in defending the country and that is it’s sole purpose.
I believe the Confederates should have negotiated a peace allowing for the border states to choose what direction to go. Whether or not slavery would continue would have been their choice and 1000s of whites would have been spared. The two countries would have become trading partners and life could have continued without the bloodshed. Where the blacks would settle would be the main problem for certain. Systematic elimination of the threat would also have remained a Confederate concern.
I am a Vietnam combat veteran. My dad flew 30 combat missions in World War II, my maternal grandfather fought in World War I and at least three of my great-great grandfathers were Confederate soldiers in the War of Northern Agression. Only the ones who fought against Lincoln’s invasion actually “fought for freedom.” The reality is that the ONLY war Americans (other than those who fought for the Confederacy) fought for freedom was the Revolution, and as Jim said, it was all about taxes. Up until 1971 when politicians decided to make it a Federal holiday, Americans knew what Memorial Day was about – to remember those who lost their war in the war in which Americans fought Americans. Every way since has been fought for “national policy,” period. By the way, those of us who fought in Vietnam WEREN’T told we were “fighting for freedom.” We weren’t told anything in fact and while the draftees may not have known it, the rest of us knew we were there because we had joined the military and it was our military duty to do whatever the President told us to.
I don’t completely agree. The Revolution was about freedom (even if the Brits were much less tyrannical than today’s Feds, and the Loyalist side had many good points – see Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson). The US-Mexican War was justified. The Confederacy, of course (though the North could also claim to have been fighting for freedom, even if the result was the beginning of the tyranny white men live under today). We should have stayed out of both World Wars, at least in Europe (I think the Pacific War was justified on both Occidentalist and human rights grounds).
The wars against communism (Korea and Vietnam) may have been unnecessary, but they were certainly morally justifiable, given the evil of communism as well as its very real drive for global dominion. I’m too young (b.1961) for Vietnam, but I strongly supported the Cold War as a young adult.
Anyway, all this is past. What matters is preparing for the “last war”, the one which will determine white survival or extinction.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Edit your comment