For as long as I can remember, my family and I have greeted men and women in military uniform with a “Thank you for your service.” Like many other average Americans, when we see people in fatigues at a local restaurant we sometimes pick up their tab when we pay our own.
My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather served in the United States Navy (my grandfather was in the thick of some of the worst Pacific battles of World War II). Another Morgan, John, was in a Virginia militia during the Revolution. So part of the respect we have shown to soldiers, sailors, and Marines has been in recognition of others engaged in the old family business.
But there is another element to our having thanked so many service members over the years. This element is deeper and much more mysterious, even atavistic. In some way I have long been in awe of people in the military because I believed they were, somehow, sacrificial offerings.
When we laud men and women in uniform with the words, “They keep us safe,” most of us surely mean that by standing on the “front lines of freedom,” by being the “tip of the spear,” the people in the ranks guard us, hold the perimeter beyond which bay the madmen who would kill us in our sleep. This much is on the level. It is common sense to thank the watchman for the service of security in life and property he provides.
But on a much darker level I believe I have long seen the military as a kind of stand-in for myself. Like a strange double in a Conrad novel, the man or woman in the camouflage or the dress blues has, now that I think about it, embodied the wild, primitive non-category of sacrifice, of the blood-price, the one who dies so the rest might live. Thanking military members has been, for me at least, not just an expression of gratitude, but also an acknowledgement of some ineffable connection across the buried cables of the psyche, a recognition that the logic of the world in some way demands that one go down while another remains among the living.
This quasi-religious superstition was shattered in 2021. This past year I have dug up those buried cables of the psyche and cut them in half. I no longer see the military as a guardian or a half-holy avatar. I see people in fatigues now as a threat, the single greatest threat to American liberty.
The first blow to my respect for the military was the deployment of the National Guard to the nation’s capital to protect the political class from the peons who get screwed so that the swamp can prosper. You all remember the scene. People with flags and attitudes busted into the “sacred ground of democracy,” the Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021. The “sacred ground of democracy” is reserved for grifting by the “elected” elite, but somehow the peons didn’t get the message. On that January day the political class called in the troops to protect what the politicos rightly called a bigger threat to “American democracy” than 9/11, because nothing will undo the current corrupt order like a populace which takes seriously the last president’s campaign slogan of “No More Bullshit.” Never mind that the only casualty was Ashli Babbitt, murdered by the Deep State. Somehow the National Guard was necessary to protect “sacred democracy” from the demos.
It wasn’t just that this selfish inversion of the selflessness of soldierly sacrifice turned me off to the military-industrial complex forever. I had long believed that the buck privates and hapless petty officers in the rank and file were conceptually separable from the blood-for-money business and full-bore statism by means of which the brass and handlers of the military-industrial complex stuff their bank accounts. I always thought that Lance Corporal Potatopeeler was just along for the ride, taking orders but generally clueless about what goes on above his pay grade.
But when I saw the Guard take the field against fellow Americans I understood that Lance Corporal Potatopeeler was no friend of mine after all. He knows what’s up, and still racks the slide. He could have refused the order to deploy against his countrymen. To my knowledge, not a single Guard member took that high road. Every single one suited up and fell into line. Makes sense when you think about it, though. The military is just another government job—nobody is going to risk his or her pension for something as silly as patriotism or honor. The Guardsmen would have pulled the trigger against Trump voters on January 6. They would pull the trigger against vax skeptics today. Paychecks over patria. Blow number one to the pro aris et focis pieties of the nation-state.
Blow number two was the downfall of the American imperial satrapy in Afghanistan. The “they keep us safe” logic still hung together while the Potomac jihadis held the field in Central Asia. As the puppet government collapsed, though, and the Biden regime’s lies about the situation mounted, a domino effect toppled, in the minds of many Americans, more than just our beliefs about the war or the White House.
The hard truth is that the people fighting in Afghanistan with an American flag on their shoulder did not fight for us. I never cottoned to 9/11 Truther theories, but I am forced to admit that it doesn’t make a difference anymore what really brought the Towers down. The military-industrial complex got everything they wanted out of 9/11, regardless of what really happened that day. Afghanistan, like Iraq, was a phony war. Whether one believes the Truther line or not, the evidence for Pakistani and Saudi implication in anti-American terrorism is overwhelming. But attacking either of those places would have jeopardized the retirement plans of the Joint Chiefs. So the military-industrial complex sent young Americans to die in the Khyber Pass for twenty years in a bloody one-act political theater performance, same routine every day. Go out of FOB, get blown to smithereens, send new recruit out tomorrow on same mission. Pull plug at twenty-year mark, make solemn faces for the lapdog media for a day or two, and then uncork champagne and enjoy retirement package and outstanding dental coverage enjoyed by all Potomac jihadis. Wave a little flag on 9/11 to remember the “sacrifice” of the troops who got ground up in your phony war.
Now that it is clear that the military-industrial complex is the enemy of mankind (is there an official count of the number of war crimes which Washington has committed since it lurched onto the low road of empire in 1861?), and also clear that the military is going to be—already has been—used against Americans, it is time for a “backdraft.” If you are in the military, draft yourself out. If you love your country, do not take the king’s shilling to kill your own countrymen. De-enlist, break ranks, go AWOL, disappear. When the armed forces become domestic MPs, then there are no more patriots in uniform.
USMC Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller called out the military-industrial complex for Afghanistan and is now sitting in the brig on four counts of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice. United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Douglas Hague resigned his commission over the immoral vaccine mandate and the “Marxist takeover of the military.” If you are in the military to protect Americans, then you are also living the military-industrial complex’s big lie. Your next assignment will be to enforce a Biden diktat in Florida or Texas, or to corral people demonstrating against utterly unconstitutional COVID lockdowns in New York. Your oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” is violated de facto by your ongoing cooperation with what has effectively become the military-industrial complex’s Praetorian Guard. You don’t work for America or for Americans. You work for Washington.
If you are still in uniform then ask yourself where your priorities lie. The government, or your country and fellow countrymen? It is time to wake up and “backdraft,” soldiers and sailors and Marines, to get the hell out of the military and join the fight for liberty raging all around you.
