Cool Blogs and Other Stuff...

[kybkh]

http://turcopolier.typepad.com


Biography
Colonel W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets). He served in the Department of Defense both as a serving officer and then as a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service for many years. He is a highly decorated veteran of several of America’s overseas conflicts including the war in Vietnam. He was trained and educated as a specialist in the Middle East by the U.S. Army and served in that region for many years. He was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. In the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) he was the “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism,” and later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service.” For his service in DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” This is the equivalent of a British knighthood. He is an analyst consultant for many television and radio broadcasts.

[kybkh]

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone

[Hastur]

I want to recommend Oryx Blog. Lots of interesting military news.

[Ex-California]

Maybe I'll start doing this again

https://mushycloseouts.wordpress.com

[TheReal_ND]

In Usonia as much as anywhere else, there is a political establishment and an associated civic religion. As we have previously articulated, this religion centers around the concept of America—a formerly ethnogeographical term which has taken on a certain ideological significance—and thus we will call it by its usual name, that being the American civic religion. Much has been written on the scriptures and saints of this religion, but one aspect in particular makes it especially distinctive among civic religions and is seldom discussed in any detail, namely that it is missionary—that is, that it seeks converts by means of immigration.

The ancient Roman civic cult, for example, could be seen as missionary, but only in the sense that any empire is missionary, imposing its format of loyalty-signalling on the peoples it conquers; and certainly there are established interests around the world in spreading certain ideas, certain loyalties, which are closely associated with the American civic religion. But unlike historically usual cults of State, the Usonian formulation is one which actively seeks immigrants to convert to it; it no longer expands geographically, but rather calls new members to move into its current geographical claim and become Americans in Usonia. There is a longstanding basis for this missionary impulse, and the purpose of this treatment is to discuss its earliest origins and its subsequent development.

First, we must note the two dominant mythic views of America which compete politically (and do so asymmetrically) within the civic religion. These form the ideological basis of the two-party system, though the governing methods of the two parties do not, of course, reflect the extent of the cultural divergence seen “on the ground”. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party—as well as the “conservative” and “progressive” mercantile, media, and lobbying circuits which are, respectively, associated with them—simply put, both appeal to Usonians on the basis of imperial unity; they differ in their audience, however, and thus attribute different qualities to their images of America.

The “conservative” view of America, found most often among the middle class and below, is perhaps most concisely embodied in the American’s Creed:

I believe in the United States of America, as a government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon these principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.[1]

In this view, America is an ideal. Nowhere in this creed—do note that it was passed as a resolution by the United States House of Representatives in 1918—is there mention of a North, a South, and a West; “the people”, though repeatedly invoked, is referred to as a unity. Indeed, there are the words “a perfect union, one and inseparable”—which would seem to contradict the words just prior: “many sovereign States”.

This sort of semantic confusion is probably the result of innovation in the civic religion appearing alongside accretions from older formulations; “many sovereign States” is evidently one such accretion, for the Southern States acted as sovereign entities in seceding from the United States and forming another union, and their defeat in the ensuing war meant the defeat of the old principle by which the States could be called sovereign—whereas the older union, in winning the ensuing war, affirmed a new principle—that it was indeed “one and inseparable”.

Thus the curious language of the above creed reflects the victory of, in particular, one Usonian people over another, and more generally of certain interests over common Usonians generally. The Usonian norm in public discourse since the time of Lincoln, then, is to argue for regional, ethnic, or class interests with the assumption that imperial unity is inviolable, and thus with appeals to American values. Even the Southern States which had formed the Confederacy could appeal to American principles as a justification for secession[2]—for had not the United States seceded less than a century before from Britain?

This assumed unity is also present, albeit in a different form, in the “progressive” view. Prominent in the academy, this view is expressed most poignantly in Langston Hughes’ Let America Be America Again (1935):

O, let America be America again-
The land that never has been yet-
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME-
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will be![3]

Here we see “the people” called to rally against another group: “those who live like leeches”. The concept of America has thus been even further abstracted from its ethnogeographical basis, and made into an imperative, an ideal: “where every man [must be] free”. It is stated explicitly that if the conditions and mores of what is called America do not reflect such an ideal, then America does not exist—”the land that never has been yet”.

The distribution of these views among the Usonian social classes follows a pattern: those with more education and a higher income are not only more likely to have a view of “American values” and related concepts more like that of Hughes,[4] but are also liable to disparage “Americanness” to the extent that they perceive America to refer to the former conception, which, though it contains no explicit ethnic character, marks one who adheres to it unmistakably as one of the middle or lower classes.[5]

Much more at
https://usonianhistory.wordpress.com

[Martin Hash]

Maybe I'll start doing this again

https://mushycloseouts.wordpress.com

Hell, yeah.

p.s. Technical ones like that are impressive.

[TheReal_ND]

http://jacobitemag.com/2017/06/14/polit ... -cant-win/

Very good read about why the right needs to stop larping about DOTR and get some real organizing done.

[Speaker to Animals]

http://jacobitemag.com/2017/06/14/polit ... -cant-win/

Very good read about why the right needs to stop larping about DOTR and get some real organizing done.

LOL

He thinks the Union were the left and the Confederates were the right.

[TheReal_ND]

The Jacobites is a far left rag. I wouldn't read it without using the proper filter tbh

[heydaralon]

I am a big fan of the war nerd Gary Brecher. I think you can still read most of his old articles on pando, although that cheap fucker updated to a pay for podcast and content model. His analysis kind or reminds me of Smitty's. I have yet to read an article by him that was not entertaining.


https://pando.com/author/garybrecher/