[MAI-NOT] The Waffen SS reborn
Dion Giles
information" is "liberty" and "The de facto role of the US armed forces
will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural
assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing". The Waffen
SS reborn!
Dion Giles
Western Australia
Behind the philosophy and practice of America's push for domination of the
world's economy and culture. First published From Parameters, Summer 1997,
pp. 4-14: US Army War College]
Constant Conflict
US Army War College Quarterly
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes,
there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe.
Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic
struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role
of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and
open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of
killing.
We have entered an age of constant conflict. Information is at once our
core commodity and the most destabilizing factor of our time. Until now,
history has been a quest to acquire information; today, the challenge lies
in managing information. Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and
apply relevant knowledge soar-- professionally, financially, politically,
militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a minority.
For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or
effectively interpret, life is "nasty, brutish . . . and short- circuited."
The general pace of change is overwhelming, and information is both the
motor and signifier of change. Those humans, in every country and region,
who cannot understand the new world, or who cannot profit from its
uncertainties, or who cannot reconcile themselves to its dynamics, will
become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more
fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States. We are entering a
new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally
more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without
precedent.
We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the "clash of
civilizations" is incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see higher
levels of constructive trafficking between civilizations than ever before.
The future is bright--and it is also very dark. More men and women will
enjoy health and prosperity than ever before, yet more will live in poverty
or tumult, if only because of the ferocity of demographics. There will be
more democracy--that deft liberal form of imperialism--and greater popular
refusal of democracy. One of the defining bifurcations of the future will
be the conflict between information masters and information victims.
In the past, information empowerment was largely a matter of insider and
outsider, as elementary as the division of society into the literate and
illiterate. While superior information--often embodied in military
technology--killed throughout history, its effects tended to be politically
decisive but not personally intrusive (once the raping and pillaging were
done). Technology was more apt to batter down the city gates than to change
the nature of the city. The rise of the modern West broke the pattern.
Whether speaking of the dispossessions and dislocations caused in Europe
through the introduction of machine-driven production or elsewhere by the
great age of European imperialism, an explosion of disorienting information
intruded ever further into Braudel's "structures of everyday life."
Historically, ignorance was bliss. Today, ignorance is no longer possible,
only error.
The contemporary expansion of available information is immeasurable,
uncontainable, and destructive to individuals and entire cultures unable to
master it. The radical fundamentalists--the bomber in Jerusalem or Oklahoma
City, the moral terrorist on the right or the dictatorial multiculturalist
on the left--are all brothers and sisters, all threatened by change,
terrified of the future, and alienated by information they cannot reconcile
with their lives or ambitions. They ache to return to a golden age that
never existed, or to create a paradise of their own restrictive design.
They no longer understand the world, and their fear is volatile.
Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces,
betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the
information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other
than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that
cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only
inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable
disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the
illusion of empowerment and community). The attempt of the Iranian mullahs
to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still
stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock
videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its
children. Our victims volunteer.
These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the
rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their cultures are
under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the
successful move on without them. The laid-off blue-collar worker in America
and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are brothers in suffering.
It is a truism that throughout much of the 20th century the income gap
between top and bottom narrowed, whether we speak of individuals,
countries, or in some cases continents. Further, individuals or countries
could "make it" on sheer muscle power and the will to apply it. You could
work harder than your neighbor and win in the marketplace. There was a
rough justice in it, and it offered near-ecumenical hope. That model is
dead. Today, there is a growing excess of muscle power in an age of
labor-saving machines and methods. In our own country, we have seen
blue-collar unions move from center stage to near-irrelevance. The trend
will not reverse. At the same time, expectations have increased
dramatically. There is a global sense of promises broken, of lies told.
Individuals on much of the planet believe they have played by the rules
laid down for them (in the breech, they often have not), only to find that
some indefinite power has changed those rules overnight. The American who
graduated from high school in the 1960s expected a good job that would
allow his family security and reasonably increasing prosperity. For many
such Americans, the world has collapsed, even as the media tease them with
images of an ever- richer, brighter, fun world from which they are
excluded. These discarded citizens sense that their government is no longer
about them, but only about the privileged. Some seek the solace of explicit
religion. Most remain law-abiding, hard-working citizens. Some do not.
The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan African, or Mexican
university graduate who faces a teetering government, joblessness,
exclusion from the profits of the corruption distorting his society,
marriage in poverty or the impossibility of marriage, and a deluge of
information telling him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the West
lives. In this age of television-series franchising, videos, and satellite
dishes, this young, embittered male gets his skewed view of us from reruns
of Dynasty and Dallas, or from satellite links beaming down Baywatch,
sources we dismiss too quickly as laughable and unworthy of serious
consideration as factors influencing world affairs. But their effect is
destructive beyond the power of words to describe. Hollywood goes where
Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of
America, is touched by America's irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees
a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is
excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.
Most citizens of the globe are not economists; they perceive wealth as
inelastic, its possession a zero-sum game. If decadent America (as seen on
the screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be because America has
looted one's own impoverished group or country or region. Adding to the
cognitive dissonance, the discarded foreigner cannot square the perceived
moral corruption of America, a travesty of all he has been told to value,
with America's enduring punitive power. How could a nation whose women are
"all harlots" stage Desert Storm? It is an offense to God, and there must
be a demonic answer, a substance of conspiracies and oppression in which
his own secular, disappointing elite is complicit. This discarded
foreigner's desire may be to attack the "Great Satan America," but America
is far away (for now), so he acts violently in his own neighborhood. He
will accept no personal guilt for his failure, nor can he bear the
possibility that his culture "doesn't work." The blame lies ever elsewhere.
The cult of victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon, and it is a
source of dynamic hatreds.
It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American
culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But
traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by
cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg,
Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize
or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary.
Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most
destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as
those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by
adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of
American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first
genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it
generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.
Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the
identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful
just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe
Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has
figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and
our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine.
There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department. Our
cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for
more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.
American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable"
products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal
achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection.
American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process
that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then
so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a
winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive.
This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not
expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All
previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal
form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of uniform,
have always embraced change (though many individuals have not, and their
conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our national excesses).
American culture is the culture of the unafraid.
Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude.
The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that feature
extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our most popular
cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action
films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to
Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are
easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or
Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a
basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-
text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to
produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a
villain, a woman to be defended or won--and violence and sex. Complain
until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn
Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of
scholarly analysis.
When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video
images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps
text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth,
demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the
privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and
opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium
of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they
shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win.
As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or
dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will
be more violence. Information victims will often see no other resort. As
work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place will respond by
rejecting reason. We will see countries and continents divide between rich
and poor in a reversal of 20th- century economic trends. Developing
countries will not be able to depend on physical production industries,
because there will always be another country willing to work cheaper. The
have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves. And we in the United
States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves. States will
struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil. Beyond
traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but
transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and
conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the
"lesser" conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its
citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to
intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we
have the guts for it.
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes,
there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe.
Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic
struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role
of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and
open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of
killing.
We are building an information-based military to do that killing. There
will still be plenty of muscle power required, but much of our military art
will consist in knowing more about the enemy than he knows about himself,
manipulating data for effectiveness and efficiency, and denying similar
advantages to our opponents. This will involve a good bit of technology,
but the relevant systems will not be the budget vampires, such as manned
bombers and attack submarines, that we continue to buy through inertia,
emotional attachment, and the lobbying power of the defense industry. Our
most important technologies will be those that support soldiers and Marines
on the ground, that facilitate command decisions, and that enable us to
kill accurately and survive amid clutter (such as multidimensional urban
battlefields). The only imaginable use for most of our submarine fleet will
be to strip out the weapons, dock them tight, and turn the boats into
low-income housing. There will be no justification for billion-dollar
bombers at all.
For a generation, and probably much longer, we will face no military peer
competitor. Our enemies will challenge us by other means. The violent
actors we encounter often will be small, hostile parties possessed of
unexpected, incisive capabilities or simply of a stunning will to violence
(or both). Renegade elites, not foreign fleets, should worry us. The
urbanization of the global landscape is a greater threat to our operations
than any extant or foreseeable military system. We will not deal with wars
of Realpolitik, but with conflicts spawned of collective emotions,
sub-state interests, and systemic collapse. Hatred, jealousy, and
greed--emotions rather than strategy--will set the terms of the struggles.
We will survive and win any conflict short of a cataclysmic use of weapons
of mass destruction. But the constant conflicts in which we selectively
intervene will be as miserable as any other form of warfare for the
soldiers and Marines engaged. The bayonet will still be relevant; however,
informational superiority incisively employed should both sharpen that
bayonet and permit us to defeat some--but never all--of our enemies outside
of bayonet range. Our informational advantage over every other country and
culture will be so enormous that our greatest battlefield challenge will be
harnessing its power. Our potential national weakness will be the failure
to maintain the moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into
an enemy's heart.
Pilots and skippers, as well as defense executives, demand threat models
that portray country X or Y as overtaking the military capability of the
United States in 10 to 20 years. Forget it. Our military power is
culturally based. They cannot rival us without becoming us. Wise
competitors will not even attempt to defeat us on our terms; rather, they
will seek to shift the playing field away from military confrontations or
turn to terrorism and nontraditional forms of assault on our national
integrity. Only the foolish will fight fair.
The threat models stitched together from dead parts to convince Congress
that the Russians are only taking a deep breath or that the Chinese are
only a few miles off the coast of California uniformly assume that while
foreign powers make all the right decisions, analyze every trend correctly,
and continue to achieve higher and higher economic growth rates, the United
States will take a nap. On the contrary. Beyond the Beltway, the United
States is wide awake and leading a second "industrial" revolution that will
make the original industrial revolution that climaxed the great age of
imperialism look like a rehearsal by amateurs. Only the United States has
the synthetic ability, the supportive laws, and the cultural agility to
remain at the cutting edge of wealth creation.
Not long ago, the Russians were going to overtake us. Then it was
oil-wealthy Arabs, then the Japanese. One prize-winning economist even
calculated that fuddy-duddy Europe would dominate the next century (a sure
prescription for boredom, were it true). Now the Chinese are our nemesis.
No doubt our industrial-strength Cassandras will soon find a reason to fear
the Galapagos. In the meantime, the average American can look forward to a
longer life-span, a secure retirement, and free membership in the most
triumphant culture in history. For the majority of our citizens, our
vulgar, near-chaotic, marvelous culture is the greatest engine of positive
change in history.
Freedom works.
In the military sphere, it will be impossible to rival or even approach the
capabilities of our information-based force because it is so profoundly an
outgrowth of our culture. Our information-based Army will employ many
marvelous tools, but the core of the force will still be the soldier, not
the machine, and our soldiers will have skills other cultures will be
unable to replicate. Intelligence analysts, fleeing human complexity, like
to project enemy capabilities based upon the systems a potential opponent
might acquire. But buying or building stuff is not enough. It didn't work
for Saddam Hussein, and it won't work for Beijing.
The complex human-machine interface developing in the US military will be
impossible to duplicate abroad because no other state will be able to come
from behind to equal the informational dexterity of our officers and
soldiers. For all the complaints--in many respects justified--about our
public school systems, the holistic and synergistic nature of education in
our society and culture is imparting to tomorrow's soldiers and Marines a
second-nature grasp of technology and the ability to sort and assimilate
vast amounts of competitive data that no other population will achieve. The
informational dexterity of our average middle-class kid is terrifying to
anyone born before 1970. Our computer kids function at a level foreign
elites barely manage, and this has as much to do with television
commercials, CD-ROMs, and grotesque video games as it does with the
classroom. We are outgrowing our 19th-century model education system as
surely as we have outgrown the manned bomber. In the meantime, our children
are undergoing a process of Darwinian selection in coping with the
information deluge that is drowning many of their parents. These kids are
going to make mean techno- warriors. We just have to make sure they can do
push-ups, too.
There is a useful German expression, "Die Lage war immer so ernst," that
translates very freely as "The sky has always been falling." Despite our
relish of fears and complaints, we live in the most powerful, robust
culture on earth. Its discontinuities and contradictions are often its
strengths. We are incapable of five- year plans, and it is a saving grace.
Our fluidity, in consumption, technology, and on the battlefield, is a
strength our nearest competitors cannot approach. We move very fast. At our
military best, we become Nathan Bedford Forrest riding a microchip. But
when we insist on buying into extended procurement contracts for
unaffordable, neo-traditional weapon systems, we squander our brilliant
flexibility. Today, we are locking-in already obsolescent defense purchases
that will not begin to rise to the human capabilities of tomorrow's service
members. In 2015 and beyond, we will be receiving systems into our
inventory that will be no more relevant than Sherman tanks and prop-driven
bombers would be today. We are not providing for tomorrow's military, we
are paralyzing it. We will have the most humanly agile force on earth, and
we are doing our best to shut it inside a technological straight-jacket.
There is no "big threat" out there. There's none on the horizon, either.
Instead of preparing for the Battle of Midway, we need to focus on the
constant conflicts of richly varying description that will challenge
us--and kill us--at home and abroad. There are plenty of threats, but the
beloved dinosaurs are dead.
We will outcreate, outproduce and, when need be, outfight the rest of the
world. We can out-think them, too. But our military must not embark upon
the 21st century clinging to 20th-century models. Our national appetite for
information and our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast
and outperform all hierarchical cultures, information-controlling
societies, and rejectionist states. The skills necessary to this newest
information age can be acquired only beginning in childhood and in complete
immersion. Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the free flow of
information simply will not be competitive. They might master the
technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the
scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is
devastating. If we insist on a "proven" approach to military affairs, we
will be throwing away our greatest national advantage.
We need to make sure our information-based military is based on the right
information.
Facing this environment of constant conflict amid information
proliferation, the military response has been to coin a new
catchphrase--information warfare--and then duck. Although there has been
plenty of chatter about information warfare, most of it has been as helpful
and incisive as a discussion of sex among junior high school boys;
everybody wants to pose, but nobody has a clue. We have hemorrhaged defense
dollars to contractors perfectly willing to tell us what we already knew.
Studies study other studies. For now, we have decided that information
warfare is a matter of technology, which is akin to believing that your
stereo system is more important to music than the musicians.
Fear not. We are already masters of information warfare, and we shall get
around to defining it eventually. Let the scholars fuss. When it comes to
our technology (and all technology is military technology) the Russians
can't produce it, the Arabs can't afford it, and no one can steal it fast
enough to make a difference. Our great bogeyman, China, is achieving
remarkable growth rates because the Chinese belatedly entered the
industrial revolution with a billion-plus population. Without a
culture-shattering reappreciation of the role of free information in a
society, China will peak well below our level of achievement.
Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities-- usually
with marginal, if any, success--and yes, they are attempting to escape our
influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and
you don't have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or
competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American
cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the
future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist
regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples' failure, while further
increasing our relative strength.
It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of
warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. But Hollywood is
"preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows
trade. Despite our declaration of defeat in the face of battlefield victory
in Mogadishu, the image of US power and the US military around the world is
not only a deterrent, but a psychological warfare tool that is constantly
at work in the minds of real or potential opponents. Saddam swaggered, but
the image of the US military crippled the Iraqi army in the field, doing
more to soften them up for our ground assault than did tossing bombs into
the sand. Everybody is afraid of us. They really believe we can do all the
stuff in the movies. If the Trojans "saw" Athena guiding the Greeks in
battle, then the Iraqis saw Luke Skywalker precede McCaffrey's tanks. Our
unconscious alliance of culture with killing power is a combat multiplier
no government, including our own, could design or afford. We are magic. And
we're going to keep it that way.
Within our formal military, we have been moving into information warfare
for decades. Our attitude toward data acquisition and, especially, data
dissemination within the force has broken with global military tradition,
in which empowering information was reserved for the upper echelons. While
our military is vertically responsible, as it must be, it is
informationally democratic. Our ability to decentralize information and
appropriate decisionmaking authority is a revolutionary breakthrough (the
over-praised pre-1945 Germans decentralized some tactical decisionmaking,
but only within carefully regulated guidelines--and they could not enable
the process with sufficient information dissemination).
No military establishment has ever placed such trust in lieutenants,
sergeants, and privates, nor are our touted future competitors likely to do
so. In fact, there has been an even greater diffusion of power within our
military (in the Army and Marines) than most of us realize. Pragmatic
behavior daily subverts antiquated structures, such as divisions and
traditional staffs. We keep the old names, but the behaviors are changing.
What, other than its flag, does the division of 1997 have in common with
the division of World War II? Even as traditionalists resist the
reformation of the force, the "anarchy" of lieutenants is shaping the Army
of tomorrow. Battalion commanders do not understand what their lieutenants
are up to, and generals would not be able to sleep at night if they knew
what the battalion commanders know. While we argue about change, the Army
is changing itself. The Marines are doing a brilliant job of reinventing
themselves while retaining their essence, and their achievement should be a
welcome challenge to the Army. The Air Force and Navy remain rigidly
hierarchical.
Culture is fate. Countries, clans, military services, and individual
soldiers are products of their respective cultures, and they are either
empowered or imprisoned. The majority of the world's inhabitants are
prisoners of their cultures, and they will rage against inadequacies they
cannot admit, cannot bear, and cannot escape. The current chest-thumping of
some Asian leaders about the degeneracy, weakness, and vulnerability of
American culture is reminiscent of nothing so much as of the ranting of
Japanese militarists on the eve of the Pacific War. I do not suggest that
any of those Asian leaders intend to attack us, only that they are wrong.
Liberty always looks like weakness to those who fear it.
In the wake of the Soviet collapse, some commentators declared that freedom
had won and history was at an end. But freedom will always find enemies.
The problem with freedom is that it's just too damned free for tyrants,
whether they be dictators, racial or religious supremacists, or abusive
husbands. Freedom challenges existing orders, exposes bigotry, opens
opportunity, and demands personal responsibility. What could be more
threatening to traditional cultures? The advent of this new information age
has opened a fresh chapter in the human struggle for, and with, freedom. It
will be a bloody chapter, with plenty of computer-smashing and
head-bashing. The number one priority of non-Western governments in the
coming decades will be to find acceptable terms for the flow of information
within their societies. They will uniformly err on the side of
conservatism--informational corruption--and will cripple their
competitiveness in doing so. Their failure is programmed.
The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We
will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of it violent. The United
States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will
wage information warfare, but we will fight with infantry. And we will
always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline.
===============================================================
Major (P) Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of
Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for future warfare. Prior
to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at
the tactical level. He is a graduate of the US Army Command and General
Staff College and holds a master's degree in international relations. Over
the past several years, his professional and personal research travels have
taken Major Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia,
Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan,
Turkey, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the
Andean Ridge. He has published widely on military and international
concerns. His sixth novel, Twilight of Heroes, was recently released by
Avon Books. This is his eighth article for Parameters. The author wishes to
acknowledge the importance to this essay of discussions with Lieutenant
Colonels Gordon Thompson and Lonnie Henley, both US Army officers.
--
(Un)subscription information, posting guidelines: http://www.flora.org/mai/
Ed Deak
and the end result will be the same as the fate of the Waffen SS, which by
the end of the war consisted mainly of conscripts. What these blundering
idiots don't count with, in spite of their alleged education, is the human
subconscious. The conscious can be controlled and channelled into any
criminal activity, but the subconscious can not and forces the committing
of bigger and bigger mistakes, until the criminal system burns out
and collapses. We can follow this same pattern in the history of all
empires. Rome was not knocked over by barbarians, but by its own
patricians who burned out by their own "competitive spirit". No
competitive system, or machinery can last very long, because the stresses
of competition will destroy it. Americans should know this just by looking
at their own dragster engines, some of which last only a few minutes
. The same happens to empires.
By the way, the Waffen SS had "Meine Ehre heisst Treue" on their belt
buckles, which means the same "Semper fidelis" of the US Marines.
Of course, I've only spent 58 years on this subject, so how could I compete
with the knowledge of a US Army major, who knows everything ?
Chers, Ed (Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC, Canada)
===================================================================
Christoph Reuss
pathological megalomania... but is actually the blueprint of
globalization by brute force (now called War On Terrorism).
Complete with strategic world maps !
http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm
Chris
__________________________________________________________
"Only force rules. Force is the first law." --Adolf Hitler
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