A Center for Military Readiness January 2013 report points to the underlying problem (one that runs far and wide through our civilisation at this hour), through a 1946 cite from George Orwell:
" . . . we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." [In Front of Your Nose, London Tribune (22 March 1946)]Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, which both pivot on how delusion can so often substitute for reality until it is too late to prevent ruin, wrote these words just after the disastrous second world war.
The road to that war -- one that Churchill, reflecting, said, would have been ever so easy to avert if sound but unpopular resolute action had been taken in good time -- was paved with the folly of appeasement and denial of the obvious declared intent of Nazi Germany during the 1930's. That state of denial dominated the cultured elites and the political culture in the major powers, isolating Churchill as a lone, lonely voice of protest deemed an outdated relic from a dead past.
And, then, when ruin stood at the door, that same statesman had to stand in the gap even as France fell like a tree rotted from the roots and as Britain came within an ace of falling also, to try to hold on until the folly of Hitler brought Russia and America into the war.
This line of thinking has come back to my mind over the past few days, as I saw how the outgoing US Defence Secretary, Leon Panetta, has announced -- as a parting shot -- that the regulation in force that blocked women in the US armed forces from official, front-line combat positions would be wiped out with the stroke of a pen.
This is yet another step in the game of playing social engineering and sexual politics with Western militaries, at the potential expense of those who may pay the price in combat and those who may pay the price of lost battles to come.
Which is the point of Orwell's warning.
This game of playing politics with military readiness (and with the wider society's stability and viability) has already given us the big push to try to declare that marriage is a mix and match game according to one's sexual habits and preferences; which is a direct threat to the viability of our civilisation.
Now, the game is heading for the battlefield, the final place of test that Orwell warns us about.
Already, we have seen a successful push to put open homosexuality in the military, which is bound to undermine military efficiency. Now, we see the further step of pretending that women are equal to men in conflict on the battlefield, as though men are not something like at least twice as strong in the upper body than women in an era where infantry routinely are being asked to walk into battle in mountainous zones and fight with over 100 lb of gear as armour returns to the battlefield.
All of this this is against the backdrop of the increasingly evident inattention to and mismanagement of the strategic significance of the rise of militant IslamISM across the Middle East through the naive support for the so-called Arab Spring that has already begun to sour into a radical IslamIST winter.
Commentator and military historian, Victor Davis Hanson has aptly observed, with subtle satire:
One way or another, we have now apparently made a number of assumptions: that in the next war we will see overtly gay men and women fully integrated in small ground units amid firefights and carnage at the front; that this will not affect negatively, but more likely improve, U.S. combat efficacy;and that those intolerant reactionaries who object and feel less safe or simply less comfortable will shun the military — and that the military will not suffer as a consequence of their absence, but more likely improve. If all true, then we are onto the brave new world!FrontPage commentator Arnold Ahlert is more blunt:
It didn’t take long for the Obama administration to advance a pernicious piece of its promised radical agenda. Two days after the president laid out his far-left vision during the inauguration, senior defense officials announced that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta will lift the military’s ban on women serving in combat. The move overturns a 1994 provision that prohibited them from being assigned to ground combat units. Panetta has given the various service branches until 2016 to come up with exemptions, and/or make any arguments about what roles should still remain closed to women. Thus, another bit of gender radicalism has been shoved down the nation’s throat through executive fiat . . . .In a follow up article today, Ahlert cites how Donnelly adds:
According to a 2009 article in National Defense Magazine, a soldier on a three-day mission in Afghanistan carries approximately 130 pounds of gear, and efforts to lighten that load have not succeeded. This is primarily due to the reality that the essentials of food, water, and ammunition cannot be replaced with lighter items. Other equipment, such as sensors, tripods, cold weather clothing, boots, sleeping bags, flashlights, and protective eyewear, have all been made lighter. But the fact remains that the average soldier is expected to carry enormous amounts of weight, simply to better ensure his chances for survival. Furthermore, a soldier must carry that weight even during periods of intense fighting. The overwhelming majority of women are not capable of meeting such standards. What is the Pentagon likely to do? In New York City, when most female applicants to the Fire Department were unable to meet the strength requirements, feminists filed a successful lawsuit, altering the standards so that a number of otherwise unqualified women could pass the test. Thus it is likely the Pentagon will pursue a similar strategy of “gender-norming” for the entire service that is already part of the Army Physical Fitness Test . . . .
Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, illuminates the folly of pursuing such double standards. “Revised ‘warrior training’ programs sound impressive, but gender-normed standards emasculate the concept by assuring ‘success’ for average female trainees,” she wrote in 2005, when the Army began a surreptitious program of putting women in smaller, direct ground-combat units. Donnelly then added the critically proper perspective to the mix. “Soldiers know that there is no gender-norming on the battlefield,” she explains.
There is also nothing that will eliminate the natural differences between men and women that play out in a number of other ways. Few things are more important for enduring the rigors of combat than morale and combat unit cohesion. It is ludicrous to believe that mixed units will be immune to the potentially de-stabilizing effects of sexual attraction . . . ["Obama Ignores Deadly Risks to Women in Combat," FrontPage, Jan 24, 2013.]
“Secretary Panetta is making this move on his way out the door, cutting Congress, and the American people out of the decision-making process…Congress…should schedule long-overdue hearings that examine the full consequences of imposing gender-based ‘diversity metrics’ on infantry battalions . . . ”Clever rhetoric can make it out that the tail of a sheep is a fifth leg, but such rhetoric simply cannot transform the tail to do the job of a leg.
Worse, we also face unit cohesion issues, in a context where it is known that such issues can be among the most deadly causes of defeat in an army:
Few things are more important for enduring the rigors of combat than morale and combat unit cohesion. It is ludicrous to believe that mixed units will be immune to the potentially de-stabilizing effects of sexual attraction . . . . It stretches the bounds of credulity to believe that sexual tension, regardless of the legitimate or illegitimate motivation behind it, would be lessened under front line, life-threatening combat conditions. Nor is it inconceivable to think that close personal relationships of a sexual nature would make some soldiers take the kind of unnecessary risks to save a lover that might not only endanger themselves, but their entire unit.So, we see a playing with fire at tactical level that matches the playing with fire at geo-strategic levels that has been going on for years now.
What am I talking about?
Simple: in our day, we see the IslamISTS making open preparations across the Middle East and Africa for global subjugation under Allah, Allah's prophet, laws and warriors.
Jihad, in one word.
Yes, Jihad.
It is folly to refuse to take off the filters of post colonialist anti-Western narrative and forget the significance of the Jihadi agenda of global conquest. But, by and large, we are in such deep denial that we cannot even accept that the predominant meaning of Jihad, in the Quran and other founding documents of Islam, and across 1400 years of history, is war to advance the cause of Islam, leading to the ultimate subjugation of the world under the Mahdi, the pivotal Islamic end of days figure.
In recent days, we have seen the countries of North Africa fall to them.
Through the blunders of a feckless American President, in 1979 [in a situation that was remarkably similar to what recently played out in Egypt and led to the deposing of a somewhat Westernised regime and the rise of an IslamIST regime in its place . . . . ], Iran fell to a somewhat different flavour of radical IslamISTS, and is now on the very threshold of nuclear weapons.
But, because of our denial, too often we cannot recognise the sort of plans implied in the following map of intent across the century we have already entered for a decade now, for what it is:
Indeed, a captured 1982 global plan of the Muslim Brotherhood to carry out just such a global 100 year conquest, is largely unknown to us. The same holds for the HLF trial discovery document on Settlement Jihad.
Instead of going on and on, I point to this previous KF comment, and to the following video on what we need to know:
My immediate concern is that we are evidently in denial and are busily making decisions with armed forces and wider society alike that will not stand sound scrutiny.
It is time to think seriously about where our civilisation is headed, before it its too late.
In case you do not understand what I mean by "too late," let me clip from a Times of Israel article by an Iranian dissident who formerly worked in Iran's Foreign Ministry, Ahmad Hashemi, now living in exile in Turkey:
During my four and a half years as an employee of the Iranian foreign ministry, I learned beyond doubt, that my country’s participation in talks is purely a stalling tactic. Having fled to Turkey to seek political asylum, I know that I’m far from the first Iranian to try and warn the world of Tehran’s determination to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
Ahmad Hashemi (centre) with Ahmadinejad
and an official visitor
It was almost a decade ago that the People’s Mujahedin, Iran’s leftist opposition in exile, first revealed the clandestine nuclear activities carried out by the regime, providing the exact addresses of some of the facilities, and letting the world know about the Islamic theocracy’s true ambitions for acquiring nuclear bombs. Since then, Iran has attended dozens of negotiating rounds merely to convince naïve politicians and dewy-eyed peaceniks that it is telling the truth. Within this context, Tehran maintains that it is trying to use diplomatic means to prove that Iran is merely working to harness nuclear energy for peaceful purposes in order to meet increasing domestic energy demand as it runs out of fuel. Iran likewise exploits the matter at home, whipping up populist nationalism with leftist-style demagoguery that depicts its nuclear program as a cardinal matter of national pride . . . .While at the Iranian foreign ministry, I served as interpreter for visiting dignitaries, diplomats and officials. I paid close attention to public proclamations and official statements. And I was present at inner-circle conversations in which a number of high-profile Iranian officials made no secret of their intention to go atomic. [He then goes on to give examples, cf. here. "Don’t be fooled: Iran wants the bomb," Times of Israel, Jan 17, 2013.]
You had better believe that Iran intends to develop and if required use such bombs for intimidation or for terrorist bombings or as outright military weapons to back a global revolution by the Mahdi, whom they believe will be the re-emerging 12th Imam of Shia Islam, after over 1,000 years of seclusion.
We may think that such beliefs are little better than fairy tales, but that is the mentality we are dealing with and must take seriously.
If you doubt me, think on what happened to those who failed to take seriously the dangers posed by the sort of Aryan Man myth ideology that swept Germany in the 1930's, and paid a terrible price in the 1940's..
Will we act before it is too late, or will we have to learn the hard way, on the battlefield, yet again? END
