"Lethality, Lethality, Lethality"
Pete Hegseth’s fondness for the word “lethality” makes me shiver. Commentators have noted that in military parlance, “lethality” refers to the capacity for violence, not the act of violence, and that Hegseth seems not to get this distinction. What makes me shiver isn’t the fact that he uses the word. I get the impression that he savours it—that he rolls it around in his mouth like a sip of fine Bordeaux before spitting it out onto the world.
Hegseth is impatient with those pesky rules of engagement—the “academic rules of engagement which have been tying the hands of our war fighters for too long.” At a recent pentagon briefing, he assured us that there would be “no stupid rules of engagement” and “no politically correct wars.”
Just turn the Generals loose to do whatever they want.
Fuck the Geneva Conventions.
Fuck compassion for the innocent.
Fuck everything except raw power.
Hegseth has been nothing if not consistent. He has defended US servicemen charged and in some cases convicted of war crimes, and apparently got his boss Donald Trump to pardon several of them. According to an article published nearly two years ago in the New Yorker, Hegseth—then co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend—began regularly featuring the stories of several accused war criminals on the show, men who Hegseth said the establishment had ‘put the screws to.’”
Among them was Mathew Golsteyn, a former Green Beret who was charged with murder after he told a polygrapher during a C.I.A. job interview that he’d shot a detainee whom he suspected of being a bomb-maker, buried him in a shallow grave, and later dug up the body and burned it. The killing and its coverup, as described, were a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which dictate the rules of war, but on an episode of ‘Fox & Friends,’ in February, 2019, Hegseth made it sound like everyday business. “If he committed premeditated murder,” Hegseth said, of Golsteyn, “then I did as well. . . . Put us all in jail.” Hegseth also championed the case of First Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who’d been sentenced to nineteen years at Fort Leavenworth for ordering his soldiers to fire on three unarmed civilians riding a motorcycle, killing two of them, in Kandahar. …Lorance’s own men had turned him in for murder.
Hegseth’s delight in destruction reminds me of the Italian poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s chilling homage to the aesthetics of war.
War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others.
Marinetti was a fascist. In fact, he co-authored the original Fascist Manifesto in 1919. His celebration of violence, and, by extension, of its perpetrators, was standard fascist fare. The ideal fascist was (and is) a hypermasculine warrior—a hard-muscled actor rather than a woke, weak, effeminate thinker.
Historian A. James Gregor points out in his book The Ideology of Fascism (sadly now out of print) that the idea that man is, or should be, a beast of prey, was dear to Mussolini’s heart. Inspired by his reading of Nietzsche, Mussolinni “specifically committed himself to opposing submission to laws” other than those that the individual imposes on himself. In his 1908 essay on Nietzsche, Mussolini went on to indicate that “Nietzsche’s conviction that man as a beast of prey… involved the conviction that man as a predatory beast is a denizen of an organized community. Without such a supposition collective struggle would be impossible, and no conquest could be secured.” In the future Duce’s own words, “Above all a principle of solidarity must govern the relationships of such blond beasts of prey.”
In other words, predation must be collective.
In in his bestselling book The War on Warriors Hegseth complains about “the Left’s antiwarrior radicalism” and comes right out and tells us that international law is irrelevant to American military adventures. “Our boys should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms eighty years ago,” Hegseth writes. “America should fight by its own rules.”
Presumably, Hegseth was referring to the Geneva Conventions. Ratified in 1949 which, together with three protocols added in 1977, they form the basis of international humanitarian law. It’s not clear which of these quaint old humanitarian rules Hegseth wants to trash. Maybe its all of them. That would include (for example) the statement in Article 3 that,
Persons taking no active part in the hostilities including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
Of course, our Secretary of War wouldn’t dream of leaning on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche or any other fancy pencil-necked thinker. Although a Princeton graduate himself, Hegseth has cancelled military attendance at “woke,” “anti-American” universities. Who needs book larnin’ and old men’s rules anyway when God’s on your side? Hegseth is a Christian Nationalist, with the crusader slogan Deus Veult—God Wills It—tattooed over his right bicep, right next to an American flag, and a crusader cross emblazoned over the corresponding pec, a none-too-subtle message. It’s now been revealed that the bombing of Iran is part of God’s plan to bring on Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ, who’s out there somewhere waiting in the wings.
So, fasten your seatbelts, folks. The end times are at hand.
Gott mit uns.
God help us.
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If only his pantomime were just for the stage. It wouldn’t be good, but its range would limited.