President Obama recently traded five Taliban terrorists for a soldier named Bowe Bergdahl who apparently left his unit and went native, and has been held captive ever since by the Taliban. Is he a POW or a traitor? The answer isn't clear. There are many questions. Did Obama neglect the niceties when he went around Congress to affect this transfer? Is Bergdahl a monster, or is he a hero?
This article in National Review provides one viewpoint:
http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...was-blindsided-bergdahl-backlash-ralph-peters
This was a great article that reveals another whole viewpoint on the story - one that cannot be put into any medium that would reach the people of the US generally, but which one has to track down in a place like National Review. My question is whether the military is really one culture as he puts it, or whether it's got liberal and conservative factions like every other institution, and thus has many people who are multinational and multicultural and don't really know which side they are on. I see the one-sided nature of the military as being something like sports (which I've played) and you wouldn't want someone on your team who was secretly working for the other team. In the military it's even worse because a traitor can call in your positions and get you killed. Bergdahl's desertion got at least six fellow soldiers killed as they went looking for him. Now he's deemed worthy of the release of five Taliban combatants who are now familiar with our ways and may yet kill more Americans now that they've been put back into circulation.
We have always had traitors in our midst, and today we have people like Ward Churchill who sided with the Islamic terrorists who hit the WTC and lost his position at UC Boulder. It used to be that Americans sided with America, but you now have a lot of people who are global in their orientation and care a lot about other cultures. At least from President Monroe on everything inside of America was America, although we had to push out a lot of indigenous people or at least mainstream them, as Reagan put it. That some groups still persist with some kind of hyphenated identity is perhaps salutary as at least we didn't commit genocide.
We have many "educated" people who side with these groups, and even try to learn their languages. I wonder if in ancient Rome there were educated people who sided with the Carthaginians, or whether this is something relatively new.
I know that in France there were many educated people who sided with the remains of Breton culture, or Occitan culture, peoples that had been beaten in battle, but never quite disappeared, and some who were within these cultures tried to revive their nearly dead languages. This is still happening in western Ireland.
You get these PR efforts on the behalf of nearly extinguished tribes, and then the whites are made out to be bandits and ruffians in a soap opera like the one instanced in the Carlisle story I started to read at the beginning of the summer in which Ike is presented as a near psychopath compared to the gentle Jim Thorpe, hero of his people.
Bergdahl's attempt to go native has something similar to it. He ordered books on how to learn Pashto, and then went over to the other side. He seems to have imagined his work in the army would be something like joining the Peace Corps. Did he join the wrong institution? I imagine there were always those who went over to the other side.
I used to be on their side. I am now mostly just disgusted with the Ward Churchills and their sappy notions that now have permanent sounding boards inside of almost all of our colleges -- the legacy of the old chant of the sixties -- hey hey, ho ho, western civ has got to go.
And what have these other civilizations got to offer? Ho. Mao. Mugabe. Amin. On.
Many are now disgusted with America, but if you look at the alternatives, they are mostly far worse. Does Bergdahl have an MBTI type? Do the military leaders? Are we really dealing with an internal American struggle between types?
This article in National Review provides one viewpoint:
http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...was-blindsided-bergdahl-backlash-ralph-peters
This was a great article that reveals another whole viewpoint on the story - one that cannot be put into any medium that would reach the people of the US generally, but which one has to track down in a place like National Review. My question is whether the military is really one culture as he puts it, or whether it's got liberal and conservative factions like every other institution, and thus has many people who are multinational and multicultural and don't really know which side they are on. I see the one-sided nature of the military as being something like sports (which I've played) and you wouldn't want someone on your team who was secretly working for the other team. In the military it's even worse because a traitor can call in your positions and get you killed. Bergdahl's desertion got at least six fellow soldiers killed as they went looking for him. Now he's deemed worthy of the release of five Taliban combatants who are now familiar with our ways and may yet kill more Americans now that they've been put back into circulation.
We have always had traitors in our midst, and today we have people like Ward Churchill who sided with the Islamic terrorists who hit the WTC and lost his position at UC Boulder. It used to be that Americans sided with America, but you now have a lot of people who are global in their orientation and care a lot about other cultures. At least from President Monroe on everything inside of America was America, although we had to push out a lot of indigenous people or at least mainstream them, as Reagan put it. That some groups still persist with some kind of hyphenated identity is perhaps salutary as at least we didn't commit genocide.
We have many "educated" people who side with these groups, and even try to learn their languages. I wonder if in ancient Rome there were educated people who sided with the Carthaginians, or whether this is something relatively new.
I know that in France there were many educated people who sided with the remains of Breton culture, or Occitan culture, peoples that had been beaten in battle, but never quite disappeared, and some who were within these cultures tried to revive their nearly dead languages. This is still happening in western Ireland.
You get these PR efforts on the behalf of nearly extinguished tribes, and then the whites are made out to be bandits and ruffians in a soap opera like the one instanced in the Carlisle story I started to read at the beginning of the summer in which Ike is presented as a near psychopath compared to the gentle Jim Thorpe, hero of his people.
Bergdahl's attempt to go native has something similar to it. He ordered books on how to learn Pashto, and then went over to the other side. He seems to have imagined his work in the army would be something like joining the Peace Corps. Did he join the wrong institution? I imagine there were always those who went over to the other side.
I used to be on their side. I am now mostly just disgusted with the Ward Churchills and their sappy notions that now have permanent sounding boards inside of almost all of our colleges -- the legacy of the old chant of the sixties -- hey hey, ho ho, western civ has got to go.
And what have these other civilizations got to offer? Ho. Mao. Mugabe. Amin. On.
Many are now disgusted with America, but if you look at the alternatives, they are mostly far worse. Does Bergdahl have an MBTI type? Do the military leaders? Are we really dealing with an internal American struggle between types?
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