G.I. Jane goes to war

How many things are wrong with this picture? More U.S. military women edging closer to combat positions in preparations for Iraq war . The young woman grabs her M-16 and leaves her husband and 2-year-old son to go off to war. It’s played rather as a human interest story, because it’s not the sort of thing that inspires patriotism or confidence in anyone.

The article mentions three arguments for doing this to the military, and to social understandings about men, women, children and war:

  • The equal civic participation argument: “There is no distinction between men and women. We feel the same way about wanting to go over there and serve.” That argument makes sense if adding women to the military is otherwise beneficial on the homefront and in the field. If it’s not beneficial then it’s not a service for them to go.
  • The equal-opportunity bureaucratic-rationality argument: “It’s a level playing field because now any service officer can do the same job, can compete … Whoever is best will rise to the top, be promoted and do well.” This argument might make sense in peacetime to people who like tidy systems that ignore issues they don’t know what to do with. In time of war, though, it’s good to deal with realities before they kill you.
  • Which brings us to the it’s-here-and-we-have-to-deal-with-it argument, the one used to silence discussion in wartime: “[W]omen are embedded in the functioning of the entire military. You can’t just pull people out on the basis of gender anymore. It’s a different way of thinking about war.” And that’s the usual strategy in social engineering: first you ignore, deny or obfuscate the issues, and then you say it’s the new reality that can’t be changed.

Posted by Jim Kalb at February 14, 2003 09:30 AM | Send
    
Comments

Modern man, being a champion and advocate of the devil, hates everything associated with the natural order established by God. His sole aim and purpose in life is to subvert that order. Whatever is by nature white, he must paint black. Whatever is high, he must bring low, and whatever is low and/or evil he must elevate. That, in a nutshell, is the entire explanation for what’s going on in our modern world.

Since this is so, what we are eventually going to see (presuming we last long enough or that hearts don’t change) is the elimination of men from all combat roles and, if possible, from the military altogether. Indeed, once this all plays out, and these peoples’ principles are taken to their logical conclusions, what we will likely end up with is a military composed either completely of women, or, preferably, of cats and dogs.

Well, except for the fact that to put cats and dogs in harm’s way involuntarily would be to affirm that they are somehow of less worth than humans, and we of course can’t have that. And to put women in harm’s way, voluntarily or not, will eventually come to be seen again as a denigration of women’s worth vice that of men. So we will finally end up returning to the idea that men should populate the military exclusively—but not because men are stronger or better suited, mind you; it will only be allowed on the understanding that men are the creatures of least worth on the planet. Such is the comic nature of modern irrationality and our ridiculous attempts to outsmart nature.

Posted by: Bubba on February 14, 2003 3:32 PM

”[…] what we are eventually going to see […] is the elimination of men from all combat roles and, if possible, from the military altogether. Indeed […] what we will likely end up with is a military composed either completely of women […]” — Bubba

I don’t see why exactly this wouldn’t happen — no joke. Bubba makes an excellent point here. Look what happened with the issue of race: we went from whites needing to find ways to help non-whites climb the rungs of the ladder to condemning whites altogether, combined with a massive Ignatiev-like government effort to eliminate whites from the population and replace them with non-whites. Merely saying what I just said would have been unimaginable only 15 years ago but today it is the reality we’re staring in the face.

Or, take “reproductive rights” — we’ve gone from abortion rights then, to Prof. Singer now, who openly advocates the snuffing-out of live, term babies partly on the basis that newborns don’t differ appreciably from fetuses so if we can kill the latter on a whim we can kill the former on a whim. Had someone said 15 years ago that a man who advocated this would be given a professorship at Princeton University to promulgate it, that person would’ve been considered an alarmist bordering on the paranoid. Yet today exactly that is the reality we are staring in the face: http://www.gnxp.com/MT/mt-tb.cgi/147

I believe that exactly what Bubba predicts will come true if people don’t wake up.


Posted by: Unadorned on February 16, 2003 10:38 AM

I apologize: the link I gave in my post, above, doesn’t work. It was meant to go to a blog entry about Prof. Singer which is posted at www.gnxp.com, fourth blog entry down, under the date Feb. 14th, entitled, “It Must Be Said.” It, in turn, links to a NYT article about a severely disabled lawyer’s perception of Singer’s ideas.

Posted by: Unadorned on February 16, 2003 3:34 PM
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