Sipsey Street Irregulars: The unpalatable truth, but the truth nonetheless.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The unpalatable truth, but the truth nonetheless.

The Truth About the Wars

When my son Matt transferred out of the 101st Airborne Division that he loved, headed for another assignment in Germany he didn't want, I had a chance to talk with a number of officers and senior NCOs at Fort Campbell who served with him in Iraq during the invasion and later in Mosul. Among them was Dan Bolger, then a one-star. I was honored that we got a chance to chat at length about his books and the Battle of Little Big Horn and the dynamics of the command relationships between Custer and Fred Benteen, in which we shared an interest.

Bolger is a rare general officer, a soldier-scholar, and (I thought at the time) painfully, analytically devoted to the truth, whatever that truth may be, however messy or inconvenient.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...: It's commendable that LGEN Bolger is telling part of the truth here. I'll have to read his book to see if he tells "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Normally I wouldn't bother to read any flag or general officer's book, because most of them wouldn't know the truth if it hit them upside the head.

Squid
III; November 12, 2014 at 7:59 AM
rexxhead said...: Whatever "solution" we ultimately decide upon, if it hopes for long-term success it absolutely positively cannot involve arming any Middle Eastern faction, friend or foe. Whenever we have shipped our military assets there, they have always been -- eventually -- turned against us.

In fact, like "War Games", in this situation, the winning move may indeed be "don't play".; November 12, 2014 at 3:13 PM
Anonymous said...: Apparently it wasn't Mark Twain, but someone did say "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme". Essentially because even with all our hi-tech gizmos we're not that far removed in our motivations and behaviors from our ancestors.

How many generals did Lincoln have to weed through before he could find one who could fight? And then, rather predictably, the result was one who was pretty much detested by the peacetime brass polishers he replaced.

Try to imagine how Gens. Wesley Clark and William Westmoreland would get along with Gens. Ulysses Grant and William Sherman.

History will decide whether or not Bolger was much of a fighter, but at least he seems to have his head on straight.; November 13, 2014 at 7:57 AM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The unpalatable truth, but the truth nonetheless.

3 comments:

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