They continually bled away their best men through rotation

Monday, March 29th, 2021

This Kind of War by T.R. FehrenbachThe American Army changed the least, T. R. Fehrenbach notes (in This Kind of War), from 1951 onward:

The men came and went; the faces changed, for the United States divisions had one great disadvantage compared to the other combatants — they continually bled away their best men through rotation. Because of rotation, quality tended to remains static. The division retained the basic excellences developed in 1951: good weapon handling, superior communications, and superb artillery and superb artillery direction. But the troops were shot through with green men and remained somewhat clumsy and heavy-footed to the last, and their patrolling left something to be desired.

The new men arrived with legs unequal to the steep Korean slopes, and by the time they had learned to patrol the windy hills and deep valleys of no man’s land, they had become casualties, or had enough points to go home.

Comments

  1. Kirk says:

    The US Army and its personnel policies from WWII forward would be a perfect illustration of that old saw wherein you conceptualize its decline and inevitable fall by means of imagining that it is actually being run by a cabal of its enemies, rather than anyone looking out for the institution and the men taking part in it.

    Oh, yeah–It is. Congress and the politicians.

    In any event, the pernicious effect of the rotation policy and all the attendant anomie generated by the loss of unit cohesion and identity are things that I think were done by the careerists involved because that’s the way they’d like to think an ideal Army would run itself. Unfortunately, since these same people don’t understand what makes good soldiers that aren’t more concerned about their almighty careers than their mission or their men, they project onto everyone else their own flakey mentality, and it just doesn’t work.

    I think I’ve mentioned that I once knew a former German WWII officer whose sole remark about the US system was that if he’d suggested such a thing as a Nazi-serving officer in the Wehrmacht, he’d have been cashiered and likely shot. Even the Nazis knew better, which should probably be taken as a “sign” we’re missing out on some essential human behavior, here.

    Root of the issue boils down to the “installed base” problem, and that there are an awful lot of officers and civilian officials involved in running the Army who’ve no idea at all how cohesion, unit identity, and making real soldiers works on a practical level.

    The effects of this crap in peacetime are bad enough; take the system to war, and you’re talking some severe problems showing up in very short order when it comes to running a unit under fire in combat. What you wind up creating with the way we do things is a multi-tier system wherein the “new guy” replacements are seen as strangers with no ties to the veterans, and the veterans oftentimes use the newly assigned replacements as cannon fodder–Something they really have no choice about doing, because until the replacements have gained some damn clue about how things work under fire, they’re active menaces to the unit, and even trying to keep them alive is a risk to the unit’s mission and survival. Thus, the classic scenes in American war movies with the alienated, frightened replacements being treated like dirt, and allowed to be killed off. The guys they were reinforcing really didn’t have any good choices, either–If you “learned their names”, then the psychic trauma stemming from failing to keep them alive under really crappy circumstances would lead to you losing your crap along with their deaths, and the only way to survive mentally was to treat replacements as fungible supplies, sub-human at best, until they’d somehow managed to last long enough to where you couldn’t avoid knowing their names.

    In a just world, the men who set this system up would have been tried for war crimes, and then executed in the most egregiously vicious manner possible–Perhaps by running a gauntlet or being turned over alive to the womenfolk of the men they’d gotten killed through sheer neglect of duty.

    If I had to guess, and that’s about all you can do, the US Army replacement system has been responsible for a non-theoretical and considerable number of combat deaths due to the lack of preparation and training it produced, as well as the loss of unit efficiency due to the constant personnel turbulence. You can’t really get at the statistics in any meaningful way, which is why this lasted as long as it did, but I’d have to estimate that the number of dead GIs is probably a significant fraction of our total casualties, from at least 10% to maybe as much as 40% or so. You can’t really get at the details because of the difficulty of attributing “cause of death” to these things, but it is there.

    In peacetime, the effects are pernicious and result in a permanent state of mediocrity. As a trainer, you’re constantly dealing with having just gotten your individual troops and their teams trained to a state of semi-proficiency, and then presented with the fact of someone being put on levy to fill an overseas assignment in some unit that none of you have ever heard of, and you don’t even know if PFC Schmedlap is going to a place where any of you know anyone at all–He’s just “on levy” for Korea, Panama, or Germany. A geographic region, not a unit.

    What happens next is that your team is crippled and thrown back to zero because that guy you lavished all your attention on to get proficient as your M60 gunner is gone, and you have to work on someone else. So, you’re in a constant state of training basic tasks A, B, C, with a never-ending cycle of repetition as guys leave. You never get to tasks of even medium difficulty as a collective, because you have to keep training and re-training on the basics. Which eventually leads to a sense of futility and an utter lack of interest in even bothering to train past the basics. It’s a real syndrome you see played out in units with high turbulence–And, one reason the Ranger Regiment is the elite that it is. They have maybe a tenth the turbulence that the guys over in Big Army have, and ohbytheway, the Regiment is small enough that a transfer from 2/75 at Fort Lewis is only going to take you over to 3/75, where you know a bunch of people and they know you… Big Army? LOL… Yeah, the few times you run into people you know in one of the bigger branches like Infantry is small enough that it basically doesn’t exist. You have to be really, really notorious for something before you’re going to be “known” across enough of your peers for it to matter. Hell, most of the branches are big enough that even the senior NCOs aren’t much more than stranger non-entities outside their limited sphere of immediate influence.

    The way the Army ran personnel from about 1940 to the present day was and is criminally incompetent. I can’t for the life of me understand why we still do it, other than the “installed base” issue of “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it, around here…”. It patently does not work, for anyone, in any real way. Although, it does keep an awful lot of personnel people doing busy-work with all the shifting of personnel assets around the world.

  2. VXXC says:

    CHANGE to present tense:

    “They continuously bleed away their best men through rotation.”

    This is the case since Korea, if not before; continuous rotation is the policy since at least Korea peace and war. It makes sense to the powers that be; they do not fight, they do not bleed.

    The roots of individual rotation go back to Marshall’s 90 division bet of WW2, actually FDR’s 90 division constraint on Marshall so more men could work in factories. This meant that instead of 265 Divisions as requested the Army was given 90. This meant divisions could not be rotated and combat losses were made up ‘individually’ as troops sent from Basic training to combat units in contact with the enemy, as there were insufficient divisions to rotate to the rear. It’s ghastly costs in feeding green troops into the maw have been known since the summer of 1944, it was noted as very costly as per the book in Korea, Vietnam and even in garrison.

    The policy of individual rotation was suspended for Desert Storm by ‘stop loss’, our policy since although erratically. When Stop loss and unit rotation instead of individual rotation are applied the results are dramatic improvement in war and peace. When the individual rotation policy is applied the results are dramatically dismally negative and of course well known. There have been infinite studies and papers and laments and books and articles on the individual rotation system and its many evils. The main evil of who decides is not however addressed, although that is the root problem as usual.

    The other canard trotted out is all the rotations make you ‘well rounded.’. A well rounded travelling salesman perhaps.

    The powers that be do not fight, do not bleed, do not cold during cold war. It’s not their problem nor even near their list of priorities so it does not change.

  3. VXXC says:

    “Thus, the classic scenes in American war movies with the alienated, frightened replacements being treated like dirt, and allowed to be killed off.”

    And only in American War Movies. An actual Trope.

    Not in German, British, Russian, Soviet, Chinese or any other war movie or military culture, not the Turks nor Mongols either is this even something they’d understand, never mind consider. Ghenghis Khan was a better leader of men than our precious wastrel elites and our Damned to a New Circle of Hell Generals.

  4. Kirk says:

    Back in the 1990s, I did a bunch of work with the Brits and the Germans. The thing that struck me as being really, really bizarre was that there was this huge class difference in the American Army that was not present in either force. For the Germans, there was a difference, but it was between “conscript” and the “professional” force, and it looked and felt a lot different than our own officer/enlisted dichotomy–For the Bundeswehr, the NCOs were clearly on the “other side” of the line from the conscript troops. But, there was a lot more of an actual egalitarianism observable, despite the trappings.

    The Brits? For all the supposed classism in British society, the amount on display in the British Army units I was working around was astonishingly low. The one that flat blew my mind was the fact that the senior NCO platoon sergeant-equivalent I was working with was “the guy” that the Royal Engineers had tasked with revising and rewriting the route clearance “pamphlet”, which was their equivalent to our field manual. Why? Because he was the guy with the most experience of that, having done it in Northern Ireland for multiple tours…. And, he was working on it while he was with us–In the US Army, that sort of responsibility would have never, ever been handed over to any NCO, it would have been in the hands of some half-trained and inexperienced company-grade officer awaiting his slot at the company commander’s course and filling in temporarily at the schoolhouse. Perish the thought that the actual guys doing the work might be the best people to write the manuals for procedures and operations…

    Somehow, the United States, a theoretically egalitarian representative republic, has wound up with an Army (and, other services…) that’s cultural mentality is more akin to something you’d think you’d find in some monarchy or dictatorship. How? You got me…

    The other data point? The former WWII German officer I knew and talked to about this stuff spent a significant amount of time, post-WWII, working with the US Army as a civilian auxiliary with the Constabulary in Germany. His impression of how things worked in the US Army vis-a-vis the officer/enlisted relationships were absolutely not good–It was his opinion that the US Army shortchanged officer training and selection, putting men who had no business being in charge of anything into the commissioned ranks. The institutionalized class differences he saw between the officers and enlisted were things he was highly critical of, and it was mind-blowing to hear him say why–Sure, the Germans were more selective of their officers, but they were also a lot more demanding of them, and expected the officers to share everything the troops suffered. The idea that an officer would walk out of a situation where the troops were dealing with nasty weather (which was something that he’d actually witnessed American officers do in the post-WWII era) and ensure their own comfort first…? Anathema to the Germans.

    I don’t know where the hell it went off the rails with the Regular Army, but I think the militias were always different from this BS, as is the National Guard.

  5. VXXC says:

    America has always been a bit of a mercantile republic with an unofficial oligarchy, to an extent, but it was limited and divided in its powers and did not until recently lose its bond with the people, nor deny the people their legitimate rights and exercise of real voting power over the government. No one ever forgot the lessons of the Revolution or the Civil War until the 20th century technocrats took charge.

    As for this, “Somehow, the United States, a theoretically egalitarian representative republic, has wound up with an Army (and, other services…) that’s cultural mentality is more akin to something you’d think you’d find in some monarchy or dictatorship. How? You got me.”

    Some of this is human nature not being corrected, some of it the egalitarian society will produce those seeking status over the masses. Some of it, sorry, is the Southern Aristocracy mentality about enlisted men, and some of it is the West Point club. But being ‘elite’ or above the others is a compulsion perhaps not necessary in societies with actual class boundaries such as the Brits or the old Germans.

    As for the National Guard: there isn’t elitism in the O corps, it can actually get worse if not checked among the NCO’s, but not bad. It certainly isn’t out of control. The decline over the last year in values of the leaders is very noticeable, however so is noticing THE REPUBLIC HAS FALLEN and we helped, unwittingly as dupes.

    It’s difficult to keep up values when that which you swore allegiance to died without a peep. Not to mention the administrative chaos of the last year was going to take a toll no matter what. Almost done, and hoping we don’t get fooled again.

  6. Paul from Canada says:

    There is a scene in Gardens of Stone (the book, not the movie), where the crusty old Sargent is venting over beers about Vietnam. Near the end, he gives his formula for winning. Paraphrased, it goes something like: “And end these one-year tours. When you daddy and I landed in Normandy, we didn’t get R&R, and didn’t go home till it was all over, till we had won.”

    See also Martin Sheen’s soliloquy at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, about how Charlie’s idea of good R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. Also George MacDonald Fraser’s quote from one of the Flashman novels about how the Afghani behind the rock with his jezail has an advantage over the British soldier “because it is his rock, do you see?”

    It seems to me that part of the problem is that in modern society and the military (that reflects to a very large extent the values of its parent society), is that we lack an over-riding motivation.

    I know this contradict to an extent one of my previous comments, an answer to The White King in another post, where I spoke against motivation and “will”, but in its place it is necessary…

    The Roman Legionary didn’t care about causes or values, or the right and wrong of his cause. He was merely doing his job from within his “family”. He was a professional soldier, doing his job, and the only opinion he cared about was that of his fellow soldiers. His motivation was to respected and accepted by his peers, and he would do incredible things to achieve this.

    At the other extreme was the Viet-Cong, or the IJA soldier, whose motivation came from a conditioned fanaticism, for which he would also do incredible things.

    Our society is now in the middle, where neither extreme exemplifies our ethos, and I fear that this makes us vulnerable and ripe for decline.

  7. Paul from Canada says:

    VXXC: “Somehow, the United States, a theoretically egalitarian representative republic, has wound up with an Army (and, other services…) that’s cultural mentality is more akin to something you’d think you’d find in some monarchy or dictatorship. How? You got me.”

    Beats me too. Goes back to what Kirk said about the British Army and their attitudes, and how a so-called class ridden society is far more pragmatic when it comes to the military matters.

    I guess it all comes down to culture, both micro and macro, and perhaps the book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America got it right. I found the concept very interesting when I first heard about it , though I haven’t read it yet. I recall another quote from a Wilbur Smith novel where a character is quoted as describing southern plantation owners, even though she hated them with a passion, as “the finest gentlemen you will see outside the court of St, James.”

    The contradictions are interesting. The US, egalitarian and individualistic in civil culture, has a much more stratified class conscious military culture than the British, who (allegedly) have a much more stratified and hierarchical civil culture, but a much more pragmatic and egalitarian military culture…

    Likewise, the so-called “Prussian discipline”, the unthinking robot like soldier was in fact imbued with Auftragstaktik, who often used their initiative to good effect, whereas the Allied soldier, brought up in an egalitarian and individualistic culture tended to hold position and wait for new orders when things went wrong and the leadership cadre was killed.

  8. Kirk says:

    Paul,

    That whole “Prussian discipline” meme is something that is actually an artifact of outside observer prejudice and desire to enact their own idiocies, mostly in American education. It didn’t actually exist as a thing after the Napoleonic Wars, because that entire mentality was one of the things that the Prussians sought to eliminate in their reforms.

    One of the really irritating and annoying things about the assholes that have spread this stupidity is that nobody ever stops to examine their premises and prejudices before casually accepting all this crap as “truth”.

    You want to espouse “Prussian rigidity” in education? Someone, please explain the von Humboldt brothers and their legacies within the German educational system. The actual founders of that system were anything but rigid; the system they created was far more open and liberal than anyone who believes in the “conventional wisdom” thinks it was.

    Most of the “Prussian rigidity” in schooling was entirely a figment of imagination, dreamed up by the outside observers who sought to bring those “reforms” to America and England. Reality was, the real “rigid” schooling system was the French, where you’d find the same subjects taught from the same books on the same day across the entire country–Or, so they sought to accomplish as an ideal.

    Anyone seeking to understand what made Prussia and Germany tick needs to explain how it was that all these “rigid disciplinarian” types managed to pull off their industrial and scientific development during the late 19th Century. Germany was, arguably, a lot more adaptable and flexible than the British or French, and it showed up in their dominance of the Central European marketplace, as well as how they were well on their way towards supplanting the British as the world’s industrial powerhouse. Absent their idiotic politics, it’s fairly certain that they’d have managed to dethrone the UK by about 1920, in terms of economic and industrial prowess.

    So, you blithely speak of “Prussian rigidity”, you need to be aware that that was entirely the figment of someone’s imagination, who had their own axes to grind–And, who lied their asses off doing it.

    Just like with the propaganda about German military “kadaversgehorsam”, the fact is that by the late 19th Century, all that was in Germany’s past. You don’t manage to create a military structure that is as rapidly adaptable and flexible as Germany’s was by WWI without having the cultural underpinnings in place. Those thousands of German mid-level officers and NCOs that made hash out of the finest French and British formations didn’t come out of some lock-step production process–They were created out of a civilian populace that embodied and possessed those same virtues of flexible adaptability that we reflexively deny they ever possessed.

    There are reasons why the Germans handed us our asses on so many occasions in both wars, and a lot of them stem from the blind way we stereotyped them as these lockstep martinets who would be unable to adapt or react. The long experience we had with impromptu little “Kampfgruppe” forming themselves up around some random staff officer, and then throwing back our attacks in a hasty counterattack ought to be someone’s first clue that the classic stereotype is wrong, wrong, wrong.

    I don’t deny that the Germans had their issues, mostly reflecting their casual acceptance of authority and an utter lack of strategic sense, but the sad fact is, our blind acceptance of all these canards about their supposed inflexible discipline has done more damage to our ability to grasp and understand what they were doing. Not to mention, it’s also kept us from learning from them, which is something we should have done starting about 1918…

  9. Kirk says:

    @Paul’s post of 3:35pm,

    Part of the problem is how we frame military service; what we’ve got right now is a completely professional force, but all of the framing we have for military issues is based on the idea of poor little conscript sons and daughters sent off to war to fight a crusade against “eeevul”.

    This militates against treating deaths in combat as the inevitable price we have to pay for assuming the role we did when we bankrupted the British Empire, and insisted on it giving up colonialism. The idea was ideology bereft of common sense; someone was going to have to do that job, and we’d have been better off if it wasn’t us doing it. Unfortunately, our then-”elite” grabbed that poison chalice as though it meant something, and here we are–With the cultural attitudes, values, and mores adapted to the idea of a conscript military and the need for a professional force of legionaries who are basically tradesmen working in the furnace of war.

    Every time I hear someone say “thank you for your service…”, I want to reach out and choke them. I was well-compensated, I knew what I was getting in to, and it’s no more “virtuous” to be a soldier under those circumstances than it is to be any other sort of tradesman or professional providing a critical public service. You don’t see people walking up to random professional firefighters and thanking them at their fire stations, although I do see and respect the value of thanking a volunteer firefighter that’s given up time away from their jobs and families to do things like wildland firefighting. The Reserve and National Guard guys deserve more thanks and appreciation than they get, and the Regular Army types really shouldn’t be treated any differently than any other “hard-case” profession. Hell, statistically, it’s way more dangerous to be an Alaskan King Crab fisherman than it is to be even a combat soldier, these days… I’ve lost more friends and acquaintances on those boats than I have in my circle of comrades from my 25 years of military service, and there ain’t nobody throwing ticker-tape parades thanking them for the crab meat they provide us all with…

    I’m ambivalent about the whole thing, to be honest. I don’t like the current “military/veterans can do no wrong” mentality we have. It’s a dirty job, but… Hell, you get compensated fairly well, and as I often observed at the time, you’re doing things you’d pay someone to let you do under other circumstances. I mean, how great is it to be a participant in a brigade-level armored attack across the floor of a high-mountain California desert…? Blow things up? Fire machineguns?

    For a lot of my career, I was getting paid to do things I’d have done for free, or even paid for myself, had I had the resources.

  10. Paul from Canada says:

    Kirk,

    Regarding the Prussian thing, that is why I used the phrase “so called”.

    Read a very good article the other day about German military training in WWII, here are a few excerpts:

    “The Germans, in contrast, had largely discarded hazing as a training methodology, recognizing it to be out-dated and counterproductive. Instead of mindless sadism, the Germans tried to make training tough in realistic, combat-orientated ways that soldiers could appreciate as actually teaching important battlefield lessons. Breaking the individual personality of the recruit was frowned on in favour of trying to find and build on strong points in their character. Off duty time in training was far more relaxed, and relations between all ranks considerably more congenial than what was found in the very stratified, class-conscious US services. Officers led the training most of the time, rather than farming it out to NCOs as was the US practice. The Germans created a degree of camaraderie across all ranks that was the envy of every other fighting force.”

    “…The Germans possessed one final advantage that added to both their initiative and morale: the selection and training of leaders. In the US, a college degree guaranteed (as today) an officer rank, despite the lack of correlation between either the affluence to pay for college or academic success with combat leadership….In Germany, merely having an Abitur and an awesome physique wouldn’t guarantee you the coveted silver shoulder straps. First, you had to submit to a detailed psychological examination conducted by a team of officers and psychologists which sought to test your willpower and determination in adversity, your decisiveness and quick-thinking under stress, and your ability to communicate clearly and teach soldiers, with the latter being tested by literally having the candidate try to teach something they knew to some random soldiers loaned to the psychological board. Assuming you got passable marks, you then had to apply to individual regiments. It was up to the colonel of each regiment to interview you, look over your test results and accept you or not. The German Army couldn’t force any colonel to take a given candidate, and there was no quota system. Having gotten this far, the officer-candidate now attended training as a common soldier in the regiment that accepted them, where they were expected to demonstrate exceptional initiative, decisiveness, determination and integrity. They were tested in their squad command abilities repeatedly. If they didn’t really shine in basic training, they simply became a private soldier.”

  11. Kirk says:

    Paul,

    I’d very much appreciate a cite for that. It’s a restatement of what I’ve researched and found over the years, and I’d very much like to read the whole thing. I hope they footnoted and cited the living hell out of it, because I’ve had a hard time trying to get across to people over the years the things I’ve discovered that were not “officially documented”.

    It’s one thing to tell someone “I learned that from talking to German veterans…”, and another to have academically-verified sources.

    It’s an interesting thing that the supposed and stereotyped German “lock-step martinets” were the opposite and actually more humane about troop training and discipline than their theoretical moral superiors in the Soviet and Western military structure. Contrast the training path for German troops and the things you read about in descriptions of Soviet military life from dedovschina to “glass houses” in the penal units, and you suddenly develop an awful lot of cognitive dissonance as to who the hell the “bad guys” really were.

    From some standpoints, at least… You can’t ever get your head around excusing the Germans for the things they did, but… Man, is it hard to remember that the Allies were the good guys, with the casually impersonal ways they went about running their opposition to “eeeevul”. After a point, you find yourself going schizo, because if you ignore things like the slaughter of the Slav civilians and the Holocaust, the Germans look pretty damn humane and a lot more sympathetic to your own values as a professional soldier. You look at American replacement and training policy, along with the wasteful tactics employed, and you’re just aghast at the slaughter. Examine the German approaches to those issues, and you’re left feeling “If that isn’t the way to handle things, it’s certainly a lot better than the ones our side was using…”.

    I’m anything but a “Wehraboo”, but… Man, is it hard to reconcile, sometimes. I have often wondered how many Allied lives would have been saved by wholesale adoption of Germanic technique and practices, married to Allied industrial power. The war could have ended in ’42 or ’43, in a sane reality.

  12. Paul from Canada says:

    Kirk,

    With respect to the rest, the problem isn’t simply the structure of the military (though there are systemic problems in most western militaries), rather, as you put it far better than I did, the relationship between the society and the military.

    The citizen soldier model creates a military far more in tune with and responsive to the base society it springs from. The fully professional force, like the Roman Legions or French Foreign Legion are totally divorced from the base society, insular, self referential etc.

    This affects how the military is used by the society that formed it.

    Professional troops, like the Legion or pre-WWI British forces in the colonies, took combat and losses as part of the job, and were for the most part used effectively by their masters. They also didn’t for the most part, care what the greater society thought about it. The Regiment was their society.

    Citizen soldiers in non-aligned or neutral nations are only used defensively, and it is understood that high casualties and desperate fighting will only happen in a war of national survival, and if there was to be any fighting elsewhere, (Sweden sent troops to Afghanistan for example), they would be in small numbers, and volunteers.

    As you so well put it, the problem is how we frame military service in our modern western society. We are not divorced from the military enough to commit to full blown war anymore.

    On the other hand, we have professional forces that we are willing to fritter away on inconsequential, not-quite-wars.

    The end result is that we spend all kinds of money and damage the military for literally decades of involvement of places like Afghanistan. Taking a drip of casualties to no good end. Our stuck in the middle “framing” as you put it, makes us ineffective.

    Twice in the last couple of decades, “we” have intervened in Haiti. Each time, we intervene when “democracy” fails. We stay long enough to have another election and then leave again, and the process repeats. We waste all the time and money for really nothing. Other than trying to reduce the number of economic migrants, and keeping chaos near our borders to a minimum, what do we actually accomplish?

    I have friends who deployed to Haiti both times, and damned if any of them saw any difference or improvement between visits. The real options are to either depose immediately the offending government and then leave a caretaker, or re-colonize the place for a couple of generations, but as usual, we do neither.

  13. Paul from Canada says:

    @Kirk 1:29pm

    Alas, it was an excerpt lifted from a post at another blog, and when I followed the link it was an answer on Quora to a question about were Marines or German soldiers tougher in WWI.

    It is a free form answer with illustrations.

    I imagine since the writer is a military history buff, the original material he is quoting likely has cites and footnotes, but alas, the Quora article does not…

    https://www.quora.com/profile/Joseph-Scott-13

  14. Paul from Canada says:

    He also goes into more detail than I quoted about the officer training and the path to a commission, breaking down the difference between pre-war and mid-war.

    There is also an interesting little tidbit about the Wehrmacht not caring too much for drill and goose-stepping, de-emphasising foot drill for regular soldiers, leaving that for the ceremonial units.

  15. Kirk says:

    Paul,

    Regarding Colonialism:

    Yeah, it’s something every “right-thinking” person decries, but… Look at Haiti or Somalia. WTF are you supposed to do? Keep bleeding money into the morass, while the people suffer under their self-created nightmares?

    The problem with colonialism is that the idea was predicated upon self-benefit for the colonizers, creating markets and opportunities for their elites to lord it over others. It wasn’t until late in the game that anyone really thought about “Yeah, let’s uplift these benighted heathens to a modern state of affairs…”, and then when they finally did, it was right before everyone packed up and went home, leaving the colonized in a half-way state of heathendom and modernity.

    An officer I knew remarked, upon our entry to Iraq in 2003, that we were starting a generation-scale project, and would likely be there for the next fifty to seventy-five years, to do it right. Nobody really took him seriously, although I agreed with him 100% based on my reading of history and the moment.

    You want to “fix” places like Somalia or Haiti, you’re either going to have to wait for history to play out, or you’re going to have to force change on those people yourself, and it won’t be pretty.

    My take on why Somalia and Haiti are the way they are is that the population is ill-adapted to the environment of the modern nation-state. There are too many traits in the population that militate against the sort of impersonal and effective cooperation you need to have between strangers–In Somalia and Haiti, as so much of the rest of Africa, the family connection trumps everything. Which is why corruption, nepotism, and all the rest of the package that is ineffectual governance prevails. The people living there are simply constitutionally incapable of the behaviors they would need to adopt in order to be “modern”, and while that’s not a value judgment, that is a fact we have to deal with. It’s also a fact you can’t easily override, either. In order to do so, you’d have to take over and effectively cull everyone with whatever it is that keeps promoting that behavior, whether it’s genetic, epigenetic, or acquired. How long would that take? Generations, or at least as long as it took to tame the Scots-Irish, who exhibited similar dysfunctional cultural traits.

    Whether you like it or not, that is a set of unpleasant facts you have to deal with in these issues. We didn’t get to modern Ireland or Scotland via some “nice” process–Those recalcitrant and irreformable types were either killed off in the sugar plantations of the New World, exiled, or slaughtered via benign neglect during the Potato Famine. Same-same here in the US–Appalachia ain’t what it is due to the environment, it’s what it is due to the people that live there, who are far from reconciled or adapted to modern life.

    What to do about all this? Well, if you can’t live with them doing their own thing, then you have to bite the bullet and do the hard work of eliminating all those who aren’t in possession of the traits amenable to living productively within the confines of “civilization”. No other paths obtain.

  16. Paul from Canada says:

    Sorry, first link was to the individual at Quora, not the actual article, I will try again:

    https://www.quora.com/Were-US-Marines-tougher-than-elite-German-troops-in-WW2

  17. Paul from Canada says:

    Yes, the issue is that we mistake the form for the substance.

    It is like Reynold’s law, paraphrased goes like this.

    “Middle class people own their own homes and go to college, so to make a larger middle class, subsidize collage and home ownership for the lower classes. The problem is that this mistakes the effect for the cause. Middle class people go to college and own their own homes as a result of being middle class. They have the necessary traits to defer gratification, save and value education etc.”

    Same for democracy. In places like Haiti, we mistake elections for democracy. To have effective democracy, you need some per-requisites first. Things like an independent judiciary, reasonably even handed application of the law and enforceable contracts. Things like a base civil society, where the line between “us” and “them” is further away.

    If my neighbor asks to borrow my lawnmower, in a properly functioning civil society, I can lend it to him, safe in the knowledge that I will get it back in pretty much the same condition I lent it out. More likely it will be full of gas, or come back with a six pack of beer or some other token of thanks.

    If he damages it, he will likely make the damage good. If he does not, or fails to return it, I can take him to court, safe in the knowledge that the judge at small claims court will judge the matter on its merits and not rule against me because he and my neighbor are from the same clan.

    Unless you have those things, and it took hundreds of years and oceans of blood for Europe to get enough of them that the concept of individual liberty stuck, and even them, democracy took longer.

    Haiti and Somalia don’t have these basic things in even small amounts, so we can’t make them democratic overnight. We can’t impose democracy. Sure, we can supervise elections, but that happens once, the biggest tribe gets control, and lords it over everyone else forever after (see Zimbabwe).

    We do this sort of thing all the time with other issues as well. Homelessness is a great example. The problem with the homeless is not a lack of homes for them to live in. We mistake the name for the problem.. The problem is chronic addiction and/or mental illness and the lack of treatment facilities for that.

    You can build a million dollar mansion for every wino and bum in SF, and they will be back on the street in a week.

    We desperately need some Confucian “Rectification of Names”.

  18. Kirk says:

    Paul,

    The 13th Analect has long been one of my most-used Confucian resources. The difficulty I have with it is that getting people to recognize the effect of their failure to address things clearly and cogently. Few manage it, and even I have problems actuating the principle in daily life. Pretense and subterfuge, plus not wanting to “hurt feelings” lead to a failure to communicate.

    The thing about most magical thinking is not that it’s necessarily magical, it’s getting people to recognize it for what it is. Nobody wants to admit to the truth underlaying a lot of what they believe, or stop and examine the basic premises of the things they treat as “ground truths” and various ideological shibboleths. “Everyone knows…” is a precursor to crappy, lazy thought that doesn’t address the actual issue.

    With regards to Haiti, one has to ask the question: What is the difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic? Same island, different people and different culture. Why the different outcomes?

    You can make the excuse of racism, but the ground truth is that each nation made itself what it is. Haiti is a self-inflicted nightmare of dysfunction, due to the efforts of its people over the centuries since settlement. Why is that? Is it inherent to their nature, or imposed by circumstance and outside agency?

    In our “enlightened” era, nobody wants to examine the premise that Haiti is what it is mostly because of Haitians. The reality is, that’s the truth of it: If enough Haitians in Haiti wanted better lives, they’d have them. The ones who leave for other shores are the people who can recognize the need, and leave to improve their circumstances, which isn’t doing Haiti as a whole much good–They’re bleeding off the competent potential reformers, which just delays the day when Haiti fixes itself.

    It’s not a question of virtue; it’s a question of adaptation. The people of Haiti are not adapted to their circumstances, and that fact is what is killing them and turning Haiti into a nightmare of dysfunctional governance and behavior. There is no “fix” that can be applied by outside agency, just like there was no “fix” for Irish dysfunction that enabled their relatively easy conquest by the English. What had to happen there was an evolution in whatever the hell it is that governs human behavior at the level of culture and nation-state; there’s no damn reason at all that the Irish had to be so disorganized as to be unable to defend themselves against the English when they came over the seas, but there we are: They were, and the reason is down to a cultural inability to cooperate well enough to defend themselves from the depredations of the Sassenach. Same-same for the Scots; they kept throwing up incompetents as leaders, and could never manage to get their shit into enough of a row to really manage themselves well enough to be capable of being a normal country. They left that for the English, and the English managed both the Irish and the Scots into success as foot-soldiers for a world-spanning empire.

    The qualities that led to this? Are they inherent, inbred, or acquired? Maybe a combination of the three? Who knows… Whatever the answer, the Haitians lack the same qualities, and getting them is going to require a lot of hard, vicious work by someone.

    I think you can make a case for civilization equating to the domestication of humanity, and the lack of domestication is what makes Somalia Somalia, and Haiti Haiti. As opposed to white-bread Anglo-Saxon, or pumpernickel German.

  19. vxxc says:

    Maybe Haiti doesn’t need democracy. Maybe we should leave them alone. Hmm.

    GDP 1961-2019

    https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=HT

    Haiti per captia 1960-1995

    https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HTI/haiti/gdp-per-capita

    Lets not leave out how much aid and charity is stolen, and as much by White Americans as the locals.

  20. Kirk says:

    If it didn’t result in the mass flow of refugees and all the ecological damage, I could support that. Why should we force modern civilization on anyone that doesn’t want it?

    The urge to “do good” is one of the most inimical and damaging of human activities. I can’t think of a single time where I’ve run into anyone who’s actually managed the feat and who did so with actual altruistic motives–Including all the local “missionaries” who go down to South America in order to do “God’s work” among the benighted and impoverished locals. There’s usually a reason for that crap, and it’s rarely a pretty one–Local guy just got popped for going down to Paraguay (I think that’s where it was…) and boinking underage girls while on “church business”. On the local church’s dime, and after his wife made great sacrifices in order to enable it all…

    One of these days, I may get to meet an actual saint. Ain’t happened yet, but I sure do run into a lot of people claiming saintly motives for their self-gratification and sins.

    Let us not even begin to examine what happened to all that money for Haiti that passed through and stuck to the Clinton organization. The initial reading on that I did a few years ago still turns my stomach, and I suspect that more than a few people are dead because they knew of it, and made protest at it all being done.

  21. Paul from Canada says:

    I should mention with all of this discussion of Haiti, that the commander of my Basic Officer Training Platoon when I did my BOTC to become an Officer in the Canadian Armed Forces in 1990, was a Haitian.

    His name was Captain Grondin. He was an artillery officer, skinny, and all of five foot nothing in height, but no nonsense, and hard as steel!

    I don’t know his personal history, other than at some point his family, likely his parents, managed to get into Quebec, and he joined the Canadian Forces. He was most proud to point out that one of the most senior officers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force sent to the First World War, was in the Artillery Branch ‘”E’ was a Gunner! Hostie!”.

    (French Canadian profanity is all religious, whereas Anglo-Saxon swearing is usually sexual or scatological in nature, i.e. s**t, c**t, f**k etc. whereas French Canadian profanity was sacrilegious , Hostie, referring to the host, Chalice, [pronounced Khaleese!] referring to to Holy Chalice).

    On my course, they introduced a new concept where about two thirds of the way way through, there was a re-organization, and a change of emphasis from “basic training” to a more academic program. If you made it to that phase, you were pretty much certain to make it through the course. At this point we had, essentially “made it” and we went into town to celebrate, and invited our instructor cadre.

    We ended up at a Karaoke bar, where we proceeded to get Captain Grondin extremely drunk on brandy, singing along to horribly un-tuneful karaoke. Long after midnight, we dropped him off, swaying drunkenly in front of his door at the married quarters, secure in the expectation that we would enjoy a well deserved sleep-in the next morning.

    More fool us! at 0600, a fresh, alarmingly un-hungover and un-nervingly sober Captain Grondin, kicked in our door and led us, all hungover and puking, on a several mile morning run!

    Captain Grondin was a better man, and a better officer than I could ever hope to be. If I had badged as a gunner, I would have considered it a privilege to serve under him.

    The point is that he was at least half “black”, and from Haiti, and as an individual, it mattered not in the slightest. I pride myself in being a small “l” libertarian, where I try to judge people on their merits, not on any superficial characteristic like skin colour or ethnic origin.

    Doubly so since I was born in South Africa.

    When I was a child, there was a thing called the Race Classifications Board. In those days it was actually illegal to have inter-racial sex, let alone contract an inter-racial marriage. Yet some people still fell in love anyway, and one way around the color bar, was to get one of the parties concerned re-classified.

    There was a South African comedian, Peter-Dirk Uys, who used to use their statistics in his show, about how many coloreds became white, how many blacks became colored and so on.

    The so-called “board” consisted of several eminent professors of “racial science” in ill-fitting suits, homburg hats and pencil mustaches, wielding textbooks written in the 1930′s in Nazi Germany. Armed with hair swatches, calipers to measure your chin to nose width ratio, and a case of glass eyes and so on, they could authoritatively determine which race you belonged to.

    Ever since discovering that this obscenity existed, I became a rugged individualist.

    A recurring theme my comments has been the idea that culture matters, That race is often a substitute for culture or class. I have mentioned before, I think, Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of a British doctor, prison psychologist, and social commentator. One of his more provocative points in one of his books, was to describe a group of people, and to get his audience to try to identify them.

    He described a social group, living in social housing in an urban area. Families were multi-generational matriarchies. Grandmother, Mother, Daughter, all raising multiple children from multiple fathers, all without paternal support, all subsisting on welfare.

    The men spent their time engaged in welfare fraud or drug dealing, with a macho “dis” culture resulting in lots of violence, and an emphasis on lots of “bling”, the right running shoes and clothing, and superficial status symbols like skinny tires and spinning rims on otherwise cheap-ass cars.

    Now most people would immediately recognize that as the typical dysfunction of the black urban ghetto in a place like Baltimore, Detroit, East LA, South Chicago and so on.

    In fact, the place he was describing was Glasgow. A place populated by the whitest people outside of Scandinavia. People so white they got sunburn if they stayed under fluorescent light too long.

    In other words, it is culture, not race, and any race can, after several generations locked in a particular situation, find themselves trapped in a cultural dead end.

    Likewise this whole “white privilege” bullsh*t. I grew up in real “white privilege”, and being on time, speaking and writing in proper grammar, is not it.

    Malia Obama is the daughter of a former president, rich, and if no longer powerful, certainly influential. She has good genetics on her side, both her parents are obstentively intelligent, alumni of ivy league schools, and she will get to attend whichever of those she chooses.

    Contrast that with a white kid I will call Jethro, born in a family in the Appalachians, or backwoods Pennsylvania coal country. He has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, comes form a multi-generational welfare dependent, meth addicted single mother family, with some suspected inbreeding to boot.

    So what “white privilege” does he have, and why should Malia Obama get preferential treatment for college admission?

    I don’t recall where I saw this, but someone commented somewhere that if you took the populations of Switzerland and Somalia and Star-Trek like swapped them around, then in short order, Somalia would become a dryer, dustier Switzerland and Switzerland would become Somalia.

    Sorry for the digression, but I wanted to make the point that it is culture, not race that accounts for this sort of stuff.

  22. Kirk says:

    Paul,

    I don’t like the entire concept of “race”, in that it’s not a reliable way to stereotype strangers you might meet. In other words, it’s not a useful tool, and it doesn’t necessarily work the way people think it does.

    What I look at is behavioral, more than anything else. Some of those traits are consistently heritable enough that you can make broad generalizations about them–Look at Detroit when it was filled with “Polacks” and “Bohunks” compared to today, when it is filled with blacks and white trash. On the one hand, nice, neat little cottages filled with productive, hard-working families looking to better themselves… On the other, the wasteland that is modern Detroit.

    That didn’t happen because of “structural racism”, no matter what the activists tell you. It happened because of the people who live there, and the choices they made as a group. Observing that fact and acting on it is not racism; it is pure empiric observational pragmatism: Stay the hell out of Detroit, and avoid those people at all costs.

    Haiti isn’t what it is due to Haitians being black; it is what it is because Haitians are Haitian. Again, that’s not racism, that’s observed fact. If Haiti had its population magically swapped with Finland, we’d have an arctic nightmare in short order, with a tropical paradise created from the hellhole that was Haiti in similarly short time. Swap the skin colors along the way, and you’d have a salutary lesson in why it’s a mistake to go by externalities instead of demonstrated behavior.

    I don’t care one damn bit for the ideas behind racism, but I do think that there are actual reasons we have that set of reflexes wired into our genome. Overcoming them requires hard work, but its work that has to be done while acknowledging that some of the factors that lay behind it all actually do exist, albeit widely misunderstood and misconstrued.

    I try to go by demonstrated behavior. Watch their hands, in other words… The man who talks incessantly about the good he intends to do me, while moving towards his weapons? I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him, and for good reason.

  23. VXXC says:

    Paul,

    The only problem with the rugged individualists being they are unable it seems to band together for the common interests or the common defense, even as all others band together to ‘erase’ them as core political platform. As we here know an individual is nothing but meat in strife. In fact they are unable to resist the ridiculous COVID diktats to GULAG from home, while the collectivists throw pagan burn, loot, murder Festivus in the streets.

    I suppose we can go back to the Lateran council to blame the concept of the individual being taken to the point of utter atomization. The Lateran council [1215] is the start of the individual with individual confession; I wonder what the French Canadian holy swearers would make of Omnis utriusque sexus [all men and women {shall confess}]?

    But the rugged individual is nothing in any struggle because he is alone, it’s really from 20th century Westerns and is in truth not just a fallacy but a trap. Perfect for politicians.

    The only reason whites are the target in America is they are in the way of unlimited power and money, because they moronically believe in dead parchment, dead laws, dead God, worst dead rights. The Constitution is gone because it stopped working for anybody – the constitution for those who wish to drive the superhighways of power is like driving through a residential area with a 15mph speed limit and speed bumps every 50 feet. They want gone the speed limits, the speed bumps and above all the residents who justify and believe in same.

    Call our Constitutions Chesterton’s speed bumps.
    We know what happens to Chesterton’s ____ anything.

    Has he been cancelled yet? Or is he too much for them to digest?

    Chesterton’s Cancellations…hmmm.

  24. Gavin Longmuir says:

    Paul: “A recurring theme my comments has been the idea that culture matters …”

    Indeed it does! But we need to peel back another layer of the onion: Where does culture come from?

    Someone wrote a short book a number of years ago — “GMP”, the Greatest Management Principle. It can be summarized in one sentence: That which gets rewarded gets done.

    A lot of culture is human beings rationally responding to incentives.

    An old gentleman from Scotland told me about the high school in the small town in which he had lived his entire life. All the time he had been in high school, one teenage girl got pregnant — and she disappeared from society. Now the same high school has special classes for its bevy of pregnant teenagers.

    What happened? Well-intentioned policies to “protect the children” by keeping babies with their mothers have now made getting pregnant almost a career choice for teenage girls. They get income, housing, cars, even foreign vacations — all paid for by the high taxes on those foolish teenage girls who don’t get pregnant and instead go out and get jobs.

    If we peel back a further layer on the onion, the issue may be that cause & effect are too slow for the Political Class (and even the broad society) to realize the eventual negative consequences of their well-intentioned acts.

  25. Gavin Longmuir says:

    Of course, I should have mentioned that all those generous benefits to the pregnant teenager go away if she marries the baby-daddy.

    Subsidize illegitimate births — get many more fatherless babies. GMP.

  26. Goober says:

    There are definitely situations where rotation benefitted the US war machine in massive ways.

    For instance, pilot rotation during WWII.

    The Japanese and Germans, both, experienced massive “brain drain” and attrition of their best pilots over the course of the war, with their “fly until you die” policy. What this lead to was that the guys teaching the new pilots, who generally hadn’t had their actual combat experience updated since pre- or very early-war, were still the guys teaching the new pilots how to fly, and how to survive, in a war that had changed light years from what it had been at the beginning.

    Tactics on dogfighting in an A5m were obsolete with the introduction of the A6M, and the ways you survived an engagement with an American pilot flying a Buffalo, versus one flying a Corsair or a Hellcat, where entirely different. Air combat changed drastically over the course of the war, and the US policy of rotating experienced pilots back to the States to train new pilots meant that even a new US pilot had the training he needed to survive an engagement that was up-to-date and relevant.

    Both the Germans and the Japanese had this knowledge in their pilot base, but it never got back to the training centers in a meaningful way, because these experienced pilots were still flying sorties against the enemy, instead of sharing that invaluable information with new pilots back home.

    It was for this reason that the naval air arm of Japan was completely eviscerated by late 1944, in spite of having experienced similar attrition rates to US pilots by that time. They launched a new aircraft carrier in 1944,the Shinano, with a full complement of planes, but not a pilot to fly them. It was a converted Yamato class battleship, up to that point in history the largest aircraft carrier to ever exist, but it was relegated to the role of “support carrier” because they had no pilots.

    This is the main reason you see German and Japanese “ace” records with such massive kill numbers. Their pilots weren’t better than ours, they just flew sorties for years on end until they died, taking all of that knowledge with them into the Pacific Ocean, or into fiery wreckage in the Bocage. American aces were rotated back to the States to train new pilots way before they could rack up massive kill counts like that.

    It’s also the reason that the US was able to field competent pilots throughout the war, instead of seeing marked drop offs in pilot quality (and quantity) as the war dragged on, like most of the Axis forces saw.

  27. Kirk says:

    Goober,

    See, this is the difference: The Germans and Japanese managed their pilots the way we managed our infantry and other ground combat formations–You there until you died, and that was the only way out.

    By contrast, they carefully managed their ground troops the way we did our pilots, making sure that the surviving veterans got a chance to pass on their hard-won knowledge to the replacements coming in.

    Weirdly, the US in particular didn’t treat ALL of their troops the way they treated pilots. There were no “25 missions and home” deals offered for line infantry. You had the luck to survive, like an acquaintance of mine did from North Africa into Czechoslovakia with 1ID, well… Yeah. You didn’t get a break, and thanks to someone really, really screwing the pooch with the calculations of his service credits after VE Day, he was still arguing with the Personnel types about whether they should send his ass to Japan or not. He was not a positive person about the Army experience he had in WWII, and when they came to tell him he was going to Korea…? LOL. Very “not happy”.

  28. Paul from Canada says:

    Kirk: “I don’t like the entire concept of ‘race,’ in that it’s not a reliable way to stereotype strangers you might meet. In other words, it’s not a useful tool, and it doesn’t necessarily work the way people think it does.”

    That was precisely my point. I brought up the race stuff, because I was getting the uncomfortable feeling that the discussion, using Haiti and Somalia as examples, could rather easily de-rail towards some rather racist directions.

    In our caveman days, strangers of any kind were suspect, and those of a different ethnicity, even more so and often for good reason, but today it is a “shortcut” that no longer works, but we are evolutionarily programmed to keep using this outdated tool.

    I am of the opinion that the individual should be judged as an individual. There is white scum and black scum, white saints and black saints, and saint or scum, is a matter of the individual’s character, not the color of their skin. Even if the statistics state that a certain type of criminal is more likely to be (for example) black, that has no bearing on an individual black man I happen to meet. He could be a gangbanger, but could also be Martin Luther King….

    My Captain I mentioned was a competent, motivating leader, and his ethnic origins were rather incidental.

    The “Race Classifications Board” I mentioned earlier made a deep impression on me for how utterly WRONG it was. The Captain who trained and mentored me in basic training, an officer I thought of as an exemplar of my profession, would not even have been allowed into the army of Apartheid South Africa in the ’70′s. His merits and contributions would not have come to pass, and his potential wasted. Instead he came to Canada and I am the better for it.

    My father brought us to Canada in the late ’70′s. He was born in Hungary (actually, the town he was born in is now in the Czech Republic). He left at 13 during the Russian invasion of ’56. His parents had no idea what happened to him until the Red Cross informed them some 6 months later that he had escaped and was to be re-settled as a refugee in Holland.

    He never talked about it, but occasionally, let slip the odd bit when drunk. I gather he was involved in the revolution in some way, and the Securitate, or the Russians, were knocking on the front door, and he was out the upstairs window, over the neighbor’s roof and away… I mentioned once, the experience of marking targets in the “butts”,(any Commonwealth soldier will know what I mean, and I think they still do it that way at Camp Perry), and hearing the supersonic crack of bullets overhead, and he offhandedly remarked that he knew the sound himself, having been shot at as he ran for the border, the person next to him hit…

    He served in the Dutch Merchant Navy as an engineer officer, met my mom that way, quit and moved to South Africa to marry her. Some years later, as a very senior engineering manager at a company that, among other things, made the pressure vessels for the Pelindaba nuclear plant, that produced the South African atom bomb, he quit all that to move to Canada.

    He started again from scratch, South Africa having exchange control in place. I well remember the black, 20 lb box of the transformer that allowed my mom to use her 220V sewing machine in Canada. It was better to bring all of our small appliances with us, as if we had sold them in South Africa, we would not have been able to bring the money out.

    We went from upper middle class, country club set, to living in a rented row-house. His engineering credential were not recognized here, so he was a car salesman to begin with, later a plant foreman at a paint and coating factory, never rising even close to the socio-economic level he voluntarily left behind.

    His motivation was simple, he had been a refugee once, and having seen what had happened in the Congo, Mozambique, Angola etc. he was determined not to be a refugee again.

    His other motivation was myself and my brother. Being on his third country and fourth language, he had very decided opinions about nationalism, and he was damned if his two sons were going to be conscripted into the service of apartheid, to, in his words, “die or lose limbs to a landmines in Angola for apartheid.”

    I make a point of thanking him for this at least once a year, as he took no end of flack from friends and acquaintances and my mother’s family when he set out to do it. My mother resented being torn from her family, and it affected their relationship for many years afterwards, but I appreciate it and tell him so.

    One of the reasons I hate the current “white fragility”, “systemic racism” bullsh*t is that I know it is EXACTLY the same thing as the Race Classifications Board. Judging someone solely on the color of their skin is the exact and dictionary definition of racism, and I want no part of it.

    I am lucky that the company I work for has not yet gone down the “unconscious bias” or “white fragility” bullsh*t, because if I ever had to sit through such a lecture, I would not be able to contain myself, and would no doubt express the opinion that this sh*t is EXACTLY the same as the (literally) Nazi science of the “Race Classifications Board”, and I would no doubt get fired for the rant it would provoke….

    Going back to Haiti and Somalia (and most other third world countries), the tragedy is that one of the reasons that they remain third world sh*tholes, is that the talented, motivated, intelligent and educated, end up leaving because the insular, tribal and corrupt nature of the society offers them nothing, and they do better elsewhere. We get the Captain Grondins and the Filipino nurses that are the backbone of many a first world hospital, when they are sorely needed “back home”, but who can blame them for fleeing the dysfunctional….

  29. Sam J. says:

    Kirk: “I don’t like the entire concept of ‘race,’ in that it’s not a reliable way to stereotype strangers you might meet.”

    Oh really???

    “1 In 3 Black Males Will Go To Prison In Their Lifetime”

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/racial-disparities-criminal-justice_n_4045144

    We all know the likelihood of Blacks being actually going to prison for every single crime is close to zero so the actual numbers involved in criminal behavior is far, far higher than this. What you are saying is that criminal behavior is of no consequence and we know this is a lie. You even, blatantly, reverse yourself in saying,”…having seen what had happened in the Congo, Mozambique, Angola etc. he was determined not to be a refugee again…”. I mean who was it that he was worried about being made a refugee? It damn sure wasn’t the Welsh or Hungarians it was Africans.

    Tuis stupidity that the law of averages doesn’t apply to race is why so many young White girls are raped and murdered every year because they are taught that all people are exactly a like and that Blacks are not more criminally minded. If they were taught the truth they would not as easily allow themselves into situations where Blacks could take advantage of them. We would not give little 3 year old White girls to savages to beat them to DEATH like happened here.

    https://www.wspa.com/news/she-was-sweet-as-could-possibly-be-former-foster-family-remembers-tori-smith/

    Or this 13 year old White girl murdered by savages.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9411541/Boy-charged-murder-shooting-death-eighth-grade-girl-Virginia.html

    (and I could go on tho fill massive pages of these savage crimes).

    I sick of being gas-lighted by the lies of the Jews.

  30. Sam J. says:

    Kirk says, “Look at Detroit…today, when it is filled with blacks and white trash…”

    Oh how convenient. We should not discriminate unless we wish to attack Whites who have somehow fought off the savage Blacks. If they do that they are,”White trash”.

    Gas-lighting, gas-lighting, gas-lighting. It’s constant and never ending gas-lighting.

    Is this guy “White trash”?

    http://streetcarnage.com/blog/being-white-in-detroit/

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