The Unjust City On A Hill
U.S. President Joe Biden, always a fountain of wisdom, says that he does not believe there was any way the U.S. military could withdraw from Afghanistan without precipitating the “chaos” we are seeing now.
First: Then the simple solution is, “Do not withdraw.”
Second: Stop using the rhetorical masking word “chaos.” What is happening is not chaos; it is a strategic and systematic takeover of the country by the enemy America set out (and promised the Afghan people) to subdue.
Third: Biden’s brilliant rationalization of his “decision” amounts to nothing but a statement of the obvious, namely that when you surrender, that means the other side wins.
General Mark Milley accepted the position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Biden administration. What a prize that must have seemed! Official overseer of global surrender, facilitator of the deliberate empowerment and emboldening of all of America’s enemies, orchestrator of the soulless disheartening and abandonment of all the desperate peoples of the world who have come to see the United States as their only salvation from death by sword or starvation, and of course head teacher in the Marxist reeducation of the U.S. military.
Is Mark Milley — a four star general after all — really a cowering, anti-freedom agent of totalitarian interests and an ideological communist? No, of course not. Or rather, yes of course — this year. For Mark Milley is a career military man, and, for all the romanticism that powerful nations build around their military men — partly because so many citizens in powerful nations are members of the military, or relations of military men — the truth, as Plato taught with perfect wisdom twenty-four centuries ago, is that military men are “the spirited class” of a society. They are smart enough to put a system of thought into practice through force, but not independent enough in their thinking to assess or doubt a system of thought, provided that system is coming as “orders” from their perceived and acknowledged superiors in the chain of command. These are the noble dogs Socrates describes in The Republic: Always temperamentally primed to “love their friends and hate their enemies,” they are an essential element of any successful political structure. Any successful political structure.
And that is the point. Without a just system of governance, and most importantly (to apply the Socratic language) a wise ruling class, the spirited guardian class of society, the noble dogs prepared to kill or die for their fellow citizens, can just as easily become a grave danger to justice and the true public good. For their natural way is to defend the regime, however that regime is identified for them, whether politically or personally. They do not carefully define or rationally evaluate regimes; they adhere to one primarily on emotional grounds, and then fight to the death to defend it. (Men such as Washington and Eisenhower are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. Socrates too allows that rare individuals may rise out of the guardian class to become rational rulers.)
Thus today, Mark Milley, the top man in the American guardian class, having been tossed the great bone of flattery from the progressive rulers of the moment, will fight to the death to defend a regime of surrender, anti-American reeducation, and the willing promotion of “chaos.”
Raging for more power without understanding what power means is a recipe for being manipulated as the critical mass of a tyrannical vanguard. This is the American mainstream today, on the so-called left and right. People are impassioned at all times — angry, frightened, greedy, lustful — and therefore lacking the moderation and self-understanding needed to think without an agenda, to judge without vested interests, and to live without a tribal rallying cry ringing in their ears.
