What an a55hat.
You need to read the whole thing, but from CBS meet William J. Astore, LTC USAF (Ret):
A military that’s being used to fight unwinnable wars is a military prone to return home disaffected and with scores to settle.Love you too Bill. I'll deport you last.
Angry and desperate veterans and mercenaries already conditioned to violence, merging with “tea baggers” and other alienated groups, could one day form our own Freikorps units, rioting for violent solutions to national decline. Recall that the Nazi movement ultimately succeeded in the early 1930s because so many middle-class Germans were scared as they saw their wealth, standard of living, and status all threatened by the Great Depression.
If our Great Recession continues, if decent jobs remain scarce, if the mainstream media continue to foster fear and hatred, if returning troops are disaffected and their leaders blame politicians for “not being tough enough,” if one or two more terrorist attacks succeed on U.S. soil, wouldn’t this country be well primed for a coup by any other name?
Don’t expect a “Seven Days in May” scenario. No American Caesar will return to Washington with his legions to decapitate governmental authority. Why not? Because he won’t have to.
As long as we continue to live in perpetual fear in an increasingly militarized state, we establish the preconditions under which Americans will be nailed to, and crucified on, a cross of iron.
22 comments:
Aww. Bless his heart, LtCol Asshole can't help hisself having such opinions. He didn't like the U.S. Military, so that's why he joined the USAF!
utopic. seriously. all these people who cry for reducing, cutting, removing, castrating... somehow believe we all live in FEAR and that the military is a knee-jerk response to it. I live without fear BECAUSE of the U.S. military. It's our [current] government and a$$hat college professors like this guy -- who live in altered realities -- that frighten me. Would I LIKE to live in a world where militaries are unnecessary? Utopia, here I come. but that is not the world we live in and that is not the world we made. Get real, Bill. I hope someone writes a reasoned response. This cries for it.
Wow, I can't believe this guy didn't make Colonel.
/sarc off
I'm curious how long LTC Asshole was allowed to preach his toxic little cocktail of defeatism and self-loathing to future USAF officers and to Naval officers before he was asked to leave his badge at the door. The last time I heard such bitterness directed to a former employer (who I trust has supplied him with a healthy retirement pension for his "efforts") was someone who was fired. Was the LTC passed over? Spurned? There's gotta be a story here for him to be so condemnatory of the hand that fed him and call upon the networks to stop using retired military as advisors. Does that go for the print medial too, LTC Bill?
Or is he jealous?
I had to make myself read that tripe to see if it drew any conclusion other than the scenario he has written in his own angry head. His lack of confidence in the US Military is exceeded only by his lack of respect for the taxpayers whose hard-earned money feathered his nest.
Leave it to CBS to find a leftist nutjob retiree and then portray him as the typical mainstream military officer. For those of you who don't know this guy, there's a reason that the Huffington Post, The Nation (self described as the flagship of the Left), MoveOn.org and others of that political ilk love him. There is also a reason he no longer teaches at the USAFA. He is a firm proponent of surrender and withdrawal in the Afghan theater. He believes that crucial war decisions should never be left in the hands of flag grade officers (whom he particularly loathes) and should be left entirely to the civilian foreign policy crowd. He is a blame America first revisionist historian who wants us all to believe that our military lost the Vietnam war (the politicians, anti-war government functionaries, or the leftist press and protestors had nothing to do with it) and we are incapable of winning now. This character is the "enemy within".
I suppose if I had the time or George Soros' money, I could beat the bushes long enough to find a retired LtCol of some service or other who thinks he's John the Baptist. Which doesn't make it so, unless Huffington Post says so, of course.
But it DOES send up a flare that the famous FBI memo was likely born less of honest analysis than trenchant left-wing ideology. The signature of approval sure was.
I guess he's been reading a little too much into the story of the "bonus army".
If he is so disaffected with all things military, perhaps he should consider removing his rank from his signature, and returning and refusing all the retirement funds and benefits he's receiving.
Oh.. right. He's one of those "do as I say, not as i do" types.
Umm one Big problem to his fiction.. We swear an Oath and it doesnt stop when we leave the service.
I agree we are in for perilous potential times, but these guys will be in my sights the first time they try this BS. Won't find much support for a coup round these parts...
A casual search via Bing shows this guy has gotten published all.over.the.place. If we are going to rebut the "Freicorps" argument, which has never taken hold in this country, we are going to need to address the institutions which publish or employ him. Buried amidst the dross, he does have a few useful points, but his hatred of the country shines through nearly every sentence. We had better damn well ensure the freedom of the internet, or clowns like this will be able to spread their poison unchecked - as they did until, oh, about 1995 or so. CBS? What's that?
Apart from the issues of the oath et al, these sort of "thoughts" are especially inappropriate for an officer in an all-volunteer military.
As an aside, the Freikorps were both ultra-nationalist and socialist (look up the meaning of Nazi). Only very sloppy thinking places them on the right because both fascism and communism were fundamentallly left-wing ideologies, both opposed to small government, free markets, and individual rights. I think the LTC will find himself very lonely if he tries to find ultar-violent left-wing types in the ranks of US military veterans. On the other hand, he could try organizing university professors...
Ironically, he was the one in his article disparaging the web and the "information anarchy" or however he termed it. Seems he's the kind who would just shut down all information that isn't useful to his cause.
Seems he's perfect for academia.
Great points AM. Like most American left-wing ideologues, this numbnut is attempting to dissociate his liberal/progressive beliefs from all their historical ties (and associated horrors) of fascism with a simple rhetorical maneuver - he does it by claiming his opponents are fascists. Straight from the Saul Alinsky playbook, with the MSM playing the role of useful idiot/enabler.
I just spent the past 15 minutes looking at close to 100 google entries for this nation-hating butt muncher and ran across this gem:
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/An_American_foreign_legion.html
This guy is EVERY WHERE talking this BS. MTH, time to bring the PAIN!
Sounds like he needs, or has had, some serious professional help. Probably from someone like Major Hassan.
As I recall, there was another nut job who was a big American Nazi party guy who had some minimal military backgrtound he liked to flaunt. LCDR Rockwell, or something like that.
I guess every profession will include a few folks who are just plain nut cases. Hopefully we weed them out better than we did with Hassan.
Wadda Maroon!
lol
Actually, there was an Air Force two star that wrote a similar article in Parameters ( The Army War College Magazine) that espoused a similar theme. Personally, I don't think it is too far off the mark IF:
1) The current we vs them mode of political discourse continues. With the implied implication that military officers can only be of one side's thought stream.
2)A global force for good. Americans became exasperated with democracy. We were disillusioned with the apparent inability of elected government to solve the nation's dilemmas. We were looking for someone or something that could produce workable answers. The one institution of government in which the people retained faith was the military. Buoyed by the military's
obvious competence in the First Gulf War, the public increasingly turned to it for solutions to the country's problems. Americans called for an acceleration of trends begun
in the 1980s: tasking the military with a variety of new, nontraditional missions, andvastly escalating its commitment to formerly ancillary duties.
(Shades of Tea bagger land!)
3) The culture of the military was fundamentally changed. All hail diversity Thursdays. Finally, organizational, political, and societal changes served to alter the American military's culture.
Sound famiiar?
its good that the warning calls are coming from within the ranks rather than from outside of it.
Birds of a feather ...
S/F
That article Skippy links to is top notch, mainly because it discusses a lot of issues that ARE occurring and ARE something we need to keep an eye on...use of DoD personnel/assets on counter-drug missions, DoD aid to and subsequent militarization of police forces, and the use of the military on U.S. soil for disaster relief, incident response (aka NORTHCOM), etc. I'm not saying these things are bad in and of themselves, but they have a proper balance, and in some cases (mainly the first two) I think we are out of balance. However, the most important reason it is top notch is that it discusses the issues in a dispassionate, apolitical manner.
This is in opposition to Lt Col D-bag who wrote a bunch of left wing oriented politically motivated bilge. Just look at the venue through which the articles were published. Skippy's article: Proceedings. Lt Col D-bag: TomDispatch (a faaaaaar left publication that no one in their right mind takes seriously...which is why it distrubs me that Bacevich has a blurb on their webpage).
Finally, one last point of irony: in an article railing against increased militarization and fascism (or whatever) in American society, he cites FDR (!) as a positive example. This would be the same President who almost certainly obfuscated the facts to get us involved in WWII and attempted to pack the Supreme Court when they wouldn't go along with his grand vision of a pseudo-socialist America. The man was a fascist in all but name, but here he is cited as a positive example...because he had a -D after his name.
For the record, the below post was written by a USAF officer (myself)...we're not all idiots like this (thankfully) retired Lt Col.
Sheesh. Ignore this guy - they'll always be nutcases writing crazy screeds like this.
Really? BJ Astore?
There's a joke somewhere there, but this poor fellow beclowns himself unaided.
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