On Being All You Can Be

The New Right and Military Service

I think one of the most bewildering features of our current age, with all its breathtaking and disorienting changes, is how all the cherished paradigms of yore have been so fully upended.

Case in point: the changing attitude toward military service on the Right. Once upon a time, it was unthinkable that any American “conservative” or rightward-leaning individual could be opposed to, let alone contemptuous of, the American military forces.

I guess I’ve recognized this evolution in my own thinking, as well; to be proud of and to respect the military came naturally, and to think otherwise was reserved for those others…the motley assortment of dregs and discards that gravitate by a sort of scientific law to the Left.

But twenty years of pointless, inept, and failed wars that sowed nothing but death and chaos in their wake—and concluded ignobly with a humiliating rout by the ever-victorious war-bands of Afghani youth—have done a great deal to dull the whilom luster of the American military, and have sapped whatever pride one felt for it.¹

That’s not to say the men who fought these failed wars are a disgrace; they are undoubtedly competent and brave as they have always been—though how much longer that will be the case under the Regime’s diversity overhauls remains to be seen. But in any case these men were ill-served by the venal popinjays that infest the top ranks of the US military, the embarrassing laughingstocks like chubby Mark Milley and David Petraeus and even old “Mad Dog Mattis” himself, all of whom are greedy and dishonorable and compromised in some fashion or other.

So they’re just like every other rotten functionary in the corrupt Regime.

And of course we can’t overlook the ridiculous politicians before whom those men bow and scrape, and whom they flatter and court with the most nauseating platitudes and obsequiousness. In short, like every other institution that has been gutted and corrupted by the Left, the military has expended a great deal of the capital that had been invested in it by greater men over the decades, and now as a force it seems just about spent—committed more to diversity initiatives, “stand down orders,” and rooting out wrongthink and the skulking menace of “fascism” and “white nationalism.”

In other words, the military has become yet another crude and ineffective instrument of the Left, and it has decayed in inverse proportion to its ideological capture. And this is nothing to wonder at; the waging of war has always been the preserve of the Right, for it is a business inextricably linked to honor, tradition, hierarchy, sacrifice, and service, which men of the Right naturally cherish.

The Left despises these things, and is suspicious of them; they are part of the world it wishes to bury and destroy. The Left never fights with soldiers or warriors; it fights with mobs and the rabble, typically peasants poorly armed and equipped, which are rounded up and marched to the front at gunpoint—as in the French and Russian revolutions, or the great wars of the last century. It scoffs at all tradition, and so it fosters none in the military. Instead, the Left attempts to mechanize warfighting and dispense with military traditions and perhaps someday even soldiers entirely; thus, the glee with which it wages push-button wars-by-proxy via drones.

Obviously the next step is fully automated, AI-controlled robotic warfare, so that the killing fields of the future will look like something from the opening scene of Terminator.

Barack Obama loved killing enemies—and even, at times, American citizens, in a chilling preview of things to come—at a distance through the use of drones, and his former Vice President is of like mind. Witness the shameful murder of innocent children by a feckless drone strike following America’s ignominious retreat from Afghanistan, when thirteen US soldiers were killed in a bombing at the International Airport in Kabul.

In the saddest episode of that whole sad affair, Biden roused himself enough from his baseline torpor to “vow retribution,” and in his best tough-guy impression promised “we will hunt you down and make you pay.” He was certainly as good as his word, in this matter at least, and he and Milley exacted their vengeance on a group of aid workers and small children whom they blew to pieces in a drone strike.

How utterly unmanly.

They didn’t even have the courage to send in a team of men to find the real culprits and do a thorough and competent job of it—and this in a country that had been under US suzerainty just a few days prior. Rather, they lazily slew some children and then considered the matter closed.

It’s all very demoralizing, and I suspect that’s the point. And I’ve noticed, at least anecdotally, a growing trend among those on the Right—the natural talent pool for the military—to turn away in disgust from an institution that they now feel is overrun with Leftist commissars and political officers, who are more interested in sniffing out ideological unorthodoxy and right-wing dissidents than in operating a competent military force.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the military’s recruitment shortfalls, with elaborate pieces by RealClearDefense and even (of all publications) Time Magazine assuring us that wokeness has absolutely nothing to do with it, that to even suggest that it has anything to do with it is racist and fascist and white supremacist, and that the real problem is that young Democrats—that famous pool of patriotic Americans whence the military has so plentifully drawn its recruits of late—are suddenly eschewing military service.

I guess they had to say something, and I suppose that’s about as good a lie as any other. But consider this—the Army has resurrected its old “Be All You Can Be” slogan, and in a recent commercial it depicts a gamut of men fighting and dying in various American wars, from the Revolutionary to the Second World War…but with the notable exception of the Civil War. In the final scene, the camera focuses in on a young white male who’s presumably just enlisted…an interesting choice for the newly “woke-ified” army.

Some have found the omission of the Civil War to be a glaring one, and in its own way very eloquent; and I tend to agree. For one thing, contra the arguments of Time Magazine and RealClearDefense, it seems the Army is leery of offending just those Southerners who still seem to make up the core recruiting pool, but which those outlets were at pains to stress were not responsible for the shortfall.

I have no doubt that the Regime despises white male Southerners, and has nothing but unmitigated contempt for them. But they still need them to fight in their army. I think it says more about the fragility of the current Regime, about its inherent weakness; that it senses, even if only subconsciously, future turmoil, and doesn’t want to bring any more attention to the possibility of a new civil war than it needs to.

The message seemed clear to me: “Things are getting ugly, our power is diminishing, and world war is looming. We need you to fight for us, and soon, so let’s not talk about civil war anymore, and let bygones be bygones. Just so long as you know that we’re still in charge, and that we’ll go back to persecuting you and your people as soon as the immediate danger has passed.”

What happened to the squeaky-voiced girl warriors raised by dykes? Surely one petite female is worth several divisions of worthless, icky men. Meanwhile, there’s also been a lot of talk about the tiresomely stupid phenomenon of so-called “army e-girls,” strumpets in fatigues that evidently belong to the military’s psychological warfare divisions, and who flaunt their assets on Tik-Tok or other social media platforms in a transparent attempt to lure lonely and disaffected young men into joining the army.

Nothing about this is honorable or worthy of a great nation.

The Taliban Männerbünde are triumphant in Central Asia, Ukraine looks less like Gulf War I and more like World War I, and the Chinese hordes are poised to invade Taiwan and drag the world into global conflict.

But who knows?

Maybe even the most deluded Leftist commissars in the upper echelons of the American military are beginning to realize that girl-bosses and social media e-girls and “diversity-is-our-strength” slogans won’t win the next world war.

Only one thing will: savage men killing other savage men. The same as it’s always been since time immemorial. I guess the real decision men of the Right have to make is whether it’s worth it any longer to throw one’s life away for the Regime, and its ruthless wars of global hegemony? Perhaps there are more important wars to prepare for.

I keep thinking about the recent news of the arrest in Romania—at the behest of the American Regime, of course—of Robert Rundo, founder of the Rise Above Movement and Will 2 Rise multimedia organization, who is most often characterized as a “violent white nationalist” or even, amusingly, a “Hitler fanatic.”

Perhaps he is.

But it seems to me that he’s also displayed uncommon initiative, a rare talent for leading and organizing men (and, more importantly, inspiring devotion and loyalty in them), the desire and the willingness to fight for his people, and a typically masculine thirst for adventure and the testing of one’s mettle in the theater of combat. A healthy country—a healthy and self-confident elite regime—would have early recognized the immense potential that such human material as a Robert Rundo displays, and would have selected for it and found a productive outlet for it.

In other words, I would think, this is the sort of person any sane military would eagerly recruit. Instead, it declares him an enemy of the state, and alienates him and those like him, while being straitjacketed into ideological conformity with Leftist utopian nonsense.

I’m far from the only one to notice this trend. In a fascinating recent article for Counter-Currents, Thomas Steuben examines the decline in white enlistment, comparing it to the famous “strike” of Achilles and his Myrmidons during the Trojan War after their snub by the commander-in-chief of the Greek forces, and contrasts it with the rise of “archeofuturist warfare:”

“The US Army missed its recruitment goal for 2022 by 25%, or 15,000 soldiers, due to a quietly growing ‘white strike’…

[…]

“Readiness is also plummeting, which is dangerous. While the F-35 is not a particularly good aircraft and is the subject of much ire, their current state is indicative of a broader declining trend. Only 53% of them are currently ‘mission capable,’ despite the fact that the goal was 65%, and less than 30% of them are ‘full mission capable,’ compared to 39% in 2020. Most competent flight line chiefs are rural whites despised by the regime, so this isn’t surprising.

“Nor is it particularly reassuring that the results of unclassified wargames predict that the United States would lose two aircraft carriers and several other ships in a conflict with China over Taiwan. But at least everyone’s online sensitivity training was accomplished!

“There is of course much more, but the preceding should be sufficient to show that the military is like an addict who has no hope of getting better until he hits rock bottom and then goes to rehab. This will probably entail a humiliating defeat at the hands of China, Russia, and/or Iran. You don’t want to be anywhere near the battlefield when it happens, especially on behalf of a regime that hates you and caused the slide into incompetence which precipitated the crisis in the first place.”

Perhaps, as some have suggested, the Regime intends to make up for its dearth of new recruits with a new class of hormonally-enhanced and thoroughly mind-wiped “tranissaries.”

Anyhow, none of this bodes well for the liberal-democratic Regime that currently battens on the vitality of the West, feeding off of its accumulated intellectual and cultural wealth like some terminal and particularly disagreeable parasite. I get the feeling it’s only lasted as long as it has because earlier generations were at least intelligent enough to find a healthy outlet for their Robert Rundos, whereas the current crop of “elites” are too smug and too stupid to understand the nature of the threat arrayed against them.

I wonder if this is what it felt like in the Soviet Union just before the collapse—all the outward pomp and manifestations of military and economic power, which turned out to be so much hollow noise in the end.

I guess we’ll soon see…

1. Predictably, in a recently released summary of a review of the 2021 Afghanistan “withdrawal” (trans: ignominious retreat), the Regime blamed the chaos and death and failures on their go-to bogeyman, the Bad Orange Man. When this bit of transparent cravenness failed to impress even the usually sycophantic media, Biden’s mouthpieces then declared—immediately after blaming Trump for their failures, and without skipping a beat—that the operation was in fact a stunning success, and something of which they were incredibly proud. But it was also a classic SNAFU and that’s all Trump’s fault.