Comments Elsewhere

Sunny: As for these comments, they are a lot of Nazi twaddle.

… because the Nazis were, of course, well known for their relentless criticism of public celebrations of military prowess.

Sabotta: As for the notion that Boyington was just paid by the “federal government” to “kill people” — while this is true in one sense, it is idiotically reductionist in another.

Please instruct me in the subtleties, then. What’s the purpose of “shooting down enemy planes,” if not to destroy the plane and kill the person? What was Boyington’s job in the south Pacific, if not to take commands from the federal government as to where and when to do just that? War, whatever you think of the cause that the war is supposed to serve, does involve killing people at another’s command. Sometimes killing is just and sometimes it’s unjust, but it is deliberate blood-letting from beginning to end.

I really have no patience with this kind of thing – I suppose I could suggest (in connection, for example, with his service with the Flying Tigers) looking up “the rape of Nanking” – but since all that happened to non-Caucausian people, I suppose it doesn’t matter.

This is disingenuous. Boyington’s military career didn’t end with the Flying Tigers and he went on to play an active and important role at the command of the United States federal government in their air war in the Pacific, after his tenure in the Flying Tigers — quite a different cause, with quite different ends and quite different means, which also happened to adversely affect the lives of a few “non-Caucasian” people along the way.

That said, it’s also rather beside the point, at least as I see it. Even if Boyington had only fought in unambiguously just wars, it’s not a University’s job to drum up military parades or put together memorials for successful killers. Why would it be?

As for Spencer, his comments on High Church revivalism in the CoE are steadfastly silly (and a reflection of his growing statism in old age), but the bulk of his remarks are quite right. The regimentation of every aspect of society, from recreation to politics to charity, into forms that unconsciously or consciously ape military subordination, at the direct expense of individualistic and industrial patterns of life, is a sign of decadence. The prominent celebration of martial and physical prowess, at the expense of art, intellect, industry, etc., is a sign of growing barbarism. Belligerent squadrons of ruddy-faced order-takers on the march may swell the Movement for or against whatever, but they don’t augur well for a free and humane society. In the very best of circumstances they may even be necessary evils to save or to make it possible to later achieve better things, but the incessant celebration of this kind of life from the commanding heights of a society is as sure a sign as any of long-standing rot.

And, to come back to the point, when did it become the job of Universities to give dead government warriors a parting rah-rah?