Minotaur

a rant

Sometime since the last time when I stood to duty as a military man, my country has resorted to a fascist ideology for troop motivation.

In my time, a generation gone, the central ideology was certainly a genuine though seldom spoken loyalty to real people whom we knew back home. After all, ours was proud to call itself a free nation and our fathers won the prior big war with a fundamentally democratic organization. We were allowed a startling degree of free speech and even free political association, even the grandsons of slaves among us, even those of us in active combat zones, certainly along the quiet stalemate fronts where goddess Fortune had me stationed. Tales of heroes we were told concerned self-motivated individuals. The Plains Indians, rated as the world's best light cavalry for much of the 19th Century, had a saying: "No man can tell another what to do."

But now, find yourself in earnest conversation with a U. S. soldier and you’ll hear, very shocking to my ears, a uniform ideal of loyalty to "God and my President". As though that were somehow a sane belief. God and my President! They use this horrifying phrase so often that it must arise from uniform instruction. Nothing even vaguely of that sort was taught to us, nor is it any part of freedom. They are even taught to call themselves not "grunts" as was our custom but "warriors" doubtlessly in hopes this trick will elevate the simple and disgusting job of slaughter to a noble role in myth.

Speaking as an earnest history student, let me tell you this: Fascism (to distinguish it among the various forms of tyranny) proclaims that the leader has divine guidance of some sort and that mystically to some degree he embodies the highest virtues of the nation. And it sees nobility in money, so that fascists throughout history are very fond of intermingling profit-making enterprise with government. Although today he may profitably pose as a "good Christian man" in fact the archetype of this leader is the ancient Roman emperor, from whose fasciae emblem our modern word derives.

Then as an earnest priest of holy Wisdom, let me also tell you this: Have no faith in faithlessness! The liar doth betray! And though he reaches with his fiery claws out to the furthest regions of the world, foolish schemes will fail. He sows the dragon’s teeth and Chaos there will reign!