They shelled hospitals, medical convoys. They shelled civilian areas without any targeting whatsoever. They put, in one case, a bomb on a young girl of about 9, placed her on a bicycle, had her drive among her friends, and then blew her up remotely. They assassinated everyone who disagreed with them. They would sometimes first rape their wives and daughters while they were tied to a post helplessly.
That was the enemy we faced. They committed a “Lt. Calley” daily for the duration of the war. It was standard policy.
But somehow–and really it was not a somehow, was it?–our troops are remembered for atrocities. We are remembered for “aggression” in trying to prevent the overthrow of what was eventually–by the late 1960’s–an elected and reasonably popular government, by Communist dictators who routinely engaged in political murder, political torture, political imprisonment, political corruption, and campaigns of deception.
“Truth is the first casualty in war.” I believe that goes back to the Greeks, probably Thucydides.
But it needs to be said that in a culture war, truth is a key target. It is a stronghold, a rallying point, a key defensive element. Communist do not target primarily armies and social systems: they target minds. Their goal is mass madness. Their goal is the cessation of the very IDEA of individuation, of individual psychological health and maturation. Everything is the State. They call the State Society, but it is, and necessarily always will be, a system of force and power run by individuals with names, personal histories, and personal agendas.
All good, if I might oversimplify only slightly, comes from people capable of growing in prolonged solitude. Such solitude relaxes the sense of compulsion most of us bring to human relationships, and which makes most of us selfish and self centered.
All evil comes from what I might call the unrisen self. All evil, seen pictorially and symbolically, comes from loaves of bread which were never allowed enough time to rise, and which are compacted, hard and rock-like in the center. It comes from people who are not people, who have not individuated, who have to be endlessly reinforced from outside to have any sense of existing at all.
And in the sense that a smart phone represents a constant companion, it would like not be overstating the case to call socialization with such a device training for Communism, which I could perhaps call “Power Elite dictated Other Direction”. Such children, from early ages, are never, ever alone with who they really are. Ever, even perhaps in sleep, where the phone is still next to them.
I have gotten a bit off track, but I think these are useful and interesting thoughts.
The larger point I initially intended is that, in the way that our bombs sometimes kill people we did not intend to kill–what we call euphemistically but perhaps necessarily “Collateral Damage”–the efforts even of well meaning combatants in the Culture war sometimes produce unhappy results.
On the one hand, we have amoral nihilists who are doing their best to carpet bomb everything we hold dear. They want to destroy our faith in our country, our culture, our history, our ideals, and in one another. They want to kill that little voice that says “everything is OK. I am safe. I feel good”, something which we all instinctively have, and which by all rights should thrive in a world of plenty, where most of us are truly safe in nearly all respects nearly all our lives.
And the central Communist lie, the one only seen by the absolute core, and even there probably not consciously (emotional deformation, malnourishment, and following stupidity being the defining attribute of these people), is that, while they want to tear everything down, THERE IS NOTHING TO REPLACE IT WITH. There is no plan for plenty, and no plan for individual psychological thriving. They have to destroy, to get what they want, all natural instincts towards the light. They have to empower the worst sorts of human beings, who should be in jail, not in charge.
Again, this is what I call Cultural Sadeism. It is a sort of church dedicated to destruction. It is evil. It is Satanic.
Ponder: if you did not know they were using children as suicide bombers in Vietnam, if you did not know they massacred entire villages, if you did not know they kidnapped from their parents tens of thousands of children, WHY did you not know this? Can you REALLY believe the press was either trying to tell the full truth, or genuinely concerned about these horrors? Of course not. That is a fairy tale.
We have had Communists in positions of influence for at least 60 years. Millions of people have died unnecessarily. Tens of thousands of Americans have died pointlessly. Hundreds of millions of people have lived miserable, shorter lives, because of these treasons.
It has for a long time been past time for all people of genuine goodwill and decency to finally grasp these facts. The true bastards are no more than 1 in a hundred, but the idiots are all who fail to see what they are up to.
Edit: actually even that was not fully what I wanted to say. Let me put it this way: McCarthy both went too far, and did not go far enough. If it is true he used the faintest whiff of suspicion to accuse people, then he was imitating the Communist Commissars in all the benighted nations where they held sway. He was conflating the suspicion of guilt with the reality of guilt.
But manifestly, there WERE and are many Communists among us. They may not use that word, but no Communist does until they feel safe in doing so. Ponder, for example–as I have asked you to do from time to time for several years–how the FUCK a guy who voted for the Communist in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War gets INTO the CIA, much less comes to run it? Put that into your pipe, and smoke on that as long as it takes to do the math. Most reasonably, you should not need a pipe, and you should not need time.
But Tailgunner Joe was a net benefit. He was pointing to a real and pervasive problem. Those he falsely accused might be viewed as Collateral Damage in a real war, being fought with real enemies.
And hatred among ourselves is a price those who have not joined the cult, who have not become Headless Ones, pay when we do not moderate our emotions properly. This is a hard thing to do. It is hard not to hate people who hate us. It is hard to turn a cheek to someone who considers you, entirely unjustly, and entirely as the result of effective brainwashing, to be some sort of monster.
Wars are ugly things, and ugliness cannot but be an outcome even of a Culture war. None of us become truly better. The best most of us can hope for is not to become the monsters they truly want us to be, so they can justify their hatred of us.
How does one fight such a war? Well, this blog is my effort at an answer.