Ridiculous Pseudo-Controversy of the Week
Earlier this week, a brief kerfuffle erupted after Marine Lt. General James Mattis was quoted as saying that it was "fun" to fight and kill certain adversaries:
Actually it's quite fun to fight 'em, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling," said Mattis.
"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis said during a panel discussion. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."
Chester, a former Marine officer who has met General Mattis, has some comments that are well worth reading. As for myself, I say simply, so freaking what? As George Orwell put it:
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
We're at war in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere with a barbarous, fanatical enemy who worship death and revel in their own cruelty. The jihadist savages who gleefully slaughter "infidels" and "apostates" have to be eliminated, there is no other way around this. War is by nature a dirty, brutal affair, and I thank God for men like General Mattis who are both willing and able to wage it on our behalf. Ralph Peters gets to the heart of the matter:
FORTUNATELY, Lt.-Gen. Mattis has three big things going for him: The respect of those who serve; the Marine Corps, which won't abandon a valiant fighter to please self-righteous pundits whose only battle is with their waistlines; and the fact that we're at war. We need more men like Mattis, not fewer. The public needs to hear the truth about war, not just the crybaby nonsense of those who never deigned to serve our country.
In my own far humbler career, the leaders I admired were those who had the killer instinct. The soldiers knew who they were. We would have followed them anywhere. They weren't slick Pentagon staffers anxious to go to work for defense contractors. They were the men who lived and breathed the warrior's life.
Table manners don't win wars. Winning our nation's battles demands disciplined ferocity, raw physical courage — and integrity. Jim Mattis has those qualities in spades.
One can only imagine what havoc the politically correct thought police would have wrought during the Second World War. Admiral William "Bull" Halsey" was famous for the phrase "kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs". Halsey's quote was even posted on a billboard on the island of Tulagi in the South Pacific.
As outspoken as Halsey was, he was easily surpassed by General George S. Patton, Jr. As General Patton told his troops in his famous speech of June 5th, 1944:
We want to get the hell over there. We want to get over there and clear the goddamn thing up. You can't win a war lying down. The quicker we clean up this goddamn mess, the quicker we can take a jaunt against the purple pissing Japs an clean their nest out too, before the Marines get all the goddamn credit.
Sure, we all want to be home. We want this thing over with. The quickest way to get it over is to get the bastards. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin. When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a Boche will get him eventually, and the hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one. We'll win this war but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans we've got more guts than they have.
In the present struggle with radical Islamist terror, we need men such as General Mattis. It is politically correct nonsense that we need to learn to do without.
posted by Dave at 8:56 PM
2 Comments:
I am not sure which is more disturbing, the quotation or the revelry with which it is praised. It is true that anyone paying any attention to world affairs must concede that there are people who seek to kill the innocent, repress ideas that differ from their own, and torture their opponents and that some of them have targeted America, our allies, and those in their own countries who support our goals with their hatred and killing. Lest we fool ourselves, though, there are those among us in America and in our allied countries who are not much different that the "radical Islamist" terrorists – some of us take pleasure and celebrate the destruction of their enemies, those who have different cultures, governments, and faiths and who seek to impose their views upon others, or at least to carve out a region on the planet where they can maintain their views without opposition.
America and our allies can, probably should, and certainly seem to be willing (at least sometimes, in some places) to support democracy, self-determination of peoples, and freedom around the world with diplomacy, trade, cultural exchange, and, yes, with military force when needed, but America and its allies should NEVER take joy in killing or harming others. We should NEVER classify entire ethnic or religious or political or national peoples as enemies, deprive them of basic human rights, seek to humiliate or torture them, or impose our views of life upon anyone, especially using military force--to do so is to do what the terrorists seek to do. They view their mission and tactics as God-ordained, and, listening to our rhetoric, so do we. The comments by Mattis disgust me and will only give those fighting America and our allies around the world more fuel for their hatred...they can now point to him and say that we are the evil people, the ones who enjoy killing! Think about it, if Mattis’ quotation had been uttered by some terrorist leader about killing some of our depraved troops or population (and don’t even suggest that all of our troops or population are heavenly), wouldn’t we be using it as propaganda showing how inhumane, soul-less, and evil his forces were? I know we would and indeed have.
Dear Anonymous,
Thank you for the comment. I'm sorry, but obviously I have to disagree. In fact, I'm afraid your thinking reflects the worst kind of moral equivalence:
"We should NEVER classify entire ethnic or religious or political or national peoples as enemies, deprive them of basic human rights, seek to humiliate or torture them"
This is true, which is why we ARE NOT AT WAR with any "ethnic or religious or political or national peoples". We are not at war with Arabs or with Islam. We are at war with a totalitarian ideology that has perverted Islam, and threatens mainstream Muslims just as much as it does us. As for depriving people of "basic human rights", there are 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have gone from living in two of the most brutal dictatorships on earth, to having nascent, still fragile democracies. If that constitutes "depriving" people of rights, then I'm sure that there are many tens of millions around the globe who would like us to come and oppress them as well.
"impose our views of life upon anyone, especially using military force--to do so is to do what the terrorists seek to do."
Frankly, the notion that democracy and freedom are being "imposed" on people who don't want it is the worst sort of bigotry. Do you really believe that the people of Afghanistan and Iraq enjoyed living under the Taliban or the Baathists? Do you believe that the millions of Afghans and Iraqis who recently voted in free elections for the first time in their lives, many at great personal risk, were grumbling the whole time? Do you honestly believe that they really don't want to be free, that they were happier with their chains? It is you who seeks to impose your belief system on others, by seeking to deny people of a different race and/or religion the same rights that you and I take for granted. BTW, we "imposed our beliefs" on Germany and Japan after WWII. Does that mean we were just like the Nazis, Japanese militarists, or Soviet Communists? I suggest you look at the Korean Penisula for a wonderfully-apt comparison.
"to do so is to do what the terrorists seek to do. They view their mission and tactics as God-ordained, and, listening to our rhetoric, so do we"
Here we go, the dueling fundamentalisms argument, a favorite of the moral equivalence crowd. Yes, George W. Bush mentioned God in his speeches. So did those notorious fundamentalists Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Most nations at war have invoked the name of God.
"The comments by Mattis disgust me and will only give those fighting America and our allies around the world more fuel for their hatred...they can now point to him and say that we are the evil people, the ones who enjoy killing"
I trust you're also willing to condemn the far more inflammatory remarks made by the likes of Halsey and Patton during World War II, and feel that they should have been removed from command, no matter how many American lives would have been lost as a result. I would also refer you back to the piece by Ralph Peters I linked to, for the opinions of an actual soldier.
As far as these comments "fueling the hatred" of our enemies, give me a break. The jihadists hate us because we are infidels, and even worse, powerful infidels who are the main obstacle to their designs. Whatever actual transgressions we commit pale in light of what the Arab media regularly accuses us of doing. For example, a Saudi newspaper recently claimed that our troops harvest the organs of dead Iraqis. Somehow, I'm thinking that people who believe we kill people and harvest their organs aren't going to get all that worked up over a few remarks by an American general.
"Think about it, if Mattis’ quotation had been uttered by some terrorist leader about killing some of our depraved troops or population (and don’t even suggest that all of our troops or population are heavenly), wouldn’t we be using it as propaganda showing how inhumane, soul-less, and evil his forces were? I know we would and indeed have."
Here's a weird thought. You'll laugh I know, but maybe, just maybe, the terrorists are evil. I know, just because they wantonly massacre men, women, and children; mutilate corpses; force girls into sham "marriages" so as to have a pretext for raping them; behead defenseless hostages on videotape; and impose barbarous totalitarian regimes wherever they have the opportunity, doesn't mean we have any right to judge them. After all, not all of us are "heavenly", thus we're no better than the jihadists. I never realized that moral perfection was the standard. I guess we'll have to rewrite the history books. After all, Americans were far less "heavenly" during WWII, therefore I suppose by your standard we were no better than the Third Reich or Japanese Empire.
I would ask you to compare the conduct of General Mattis and his Marines with that of our enemy, as Mackubin Owens did at National Review Online. No. Americans are far from perfect. As Abu Ghraib showed, we have our own vicious sadists. However, if you honestly cannot see the difference between America and the jihadists, if you really believe that this war is between two competing fundamentalisms that are essentially the same, I would ask only that you do the following:
Think about what the world would like if the tables were turned, if an America in decline found itself confronted by a dominant Islamist superstate spanning from North Africa to the Pacific, the goal to which the jihadists ultimately aspire. Do you really think that the world wouldn't be any different, that you would enjoy the same freedoms you do now? Last November, the jihadists murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam for making a movie critical of the Islamic treatment of women, a vicious act of bloodstained censorship. Has the CIA gone around bumping off Michael Moore or his European counterparts? Or Saudi "journalists" who claim that Americans are havesting organs from dead Iraqis? What do you think the radical Islamists would do with the kind of power America now possesses?
Anyway, I do appreciate your taking the time to comment. I obviously didn't agree, but I do thank you for reading, and for expressing your views in a mature, thoughtful way. I hope I have reciprocated.
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