Allen West: Has the Militarist Right Found its New Warlord?

(Photo composite by William Wallace Grigg.)

Hello, Tea Partiers. Look at your president. Now back to me. Now back at your president. Now – back to me. Sadly, your president isn’t me…. Look down. Back up -- where are you? You’re in a torchlight parade led by the man who could be your president! What’s in your hand? – back at me. I have it – it’s that Constitution that you say you love. Look again – your Constitution has been replaced by a military junta! Anything is possible when your man smells like white phosphorous. I’m on a white horse.

"I want to start a draft Allen West movement!" exclaimed Glen Beck during his April 21st radio program. The radio personality has been cooing and burbling about West for months. He's convinced that the retired Army Lt. Colonel -- who was cashiered in disgrace for abusing a prisoner in a fashion that merited prosecution under Article 93 of the UCMJ -- is the "man of honor" our troubled country needs. 

Of course, Beck isn't the only one infatuated with West: the freshman congressman from Florida is emerging as something of an Old Spice Guy for the punitive populist Right.


"The next president will be either the end or the beginning of our country," Beck intoned, taking note of the potentially apocalyptic consequences of the metastasizing debt and our continued descent into an economic abyss. West has displayed no measurable interest in reducing the size and expense of the Leviathan State. In fact, the contrary is true: Before being elected to represent a Florida congressional district, West was an employee of the wealth-devouring, debt-propelled imperial military. His career as a hireling killer is what Beck describes as his most alluring trait.


"He has a strong military background," Beck gushed. "The guy was led through war, and he's not afraid to pull the trigger."


With Washington's legions engaged in three open wars and at least five covert conflicts, it's clear that the incumbent warlord is not hindered by a disinclination to "pull the trigger." In fact, under the reign of the Nobel Peace Laureate, Washington's military entanglements have expanded considerably and deepened dramatically, particularly through the use of death-dispensing drone aircraft. 

In terms of bellicosity overseas, a President Allen West would most likely take up seamlessly from his predecessor. The substantive difference between the two would become apparent in domestic affairs: West's model of an ideal society is the proto-fascist totalitarian state that ruled ancient Sparta.

In a recent address to a meeting of the Evangelical group "Women Impacting the Nation," West extolled the supposed virtues of the Spartan system, in which children (at least those who made the initial cut as newborns and weren't selected as genetic culls to be hurled from a cliff) were stolen from their parents and raised as the property of the State.

 "Spartan women at the age of nine gave up their male sons," West recounted to the gathering. "And their male sons went into a training that was called the Agoge and they stayed in that training for the next eleven to twelve years. And when they were finally qualified, when they were finally ready to join the ranks for the Spartan army, it was not their father who gave them their cloak and shield. It was their mother who gave them their shield" -- while uttering the famous admonition to return either carrying the shield in triumph, or as a lifeless corpse being carried upon it.



  
The ironies are thick enough here to blot out the sun, but it's sufficient to focus on three of them. First, the Evangelical women in the audience can be heard swooning with approval as West hymns the purported merits of a thoroughly pagan society that embodied the antithesis of every Christian virtue. Second, West -- who insists that we must either subjugate or annihilate Muslims because they "have no respect for human life" -- apparently believes that America should re-model itself after a garrison state built on a foundation of institutionalized child sacrifice on behalf of the State.

Even more remarkably, the same Allen West who recently sent a thrill down the leg of many Right-collectivist warbots by denouncing the integration of homosexuals into the imperial military heaped extravagant praise on a military indoctrination system built on what Dr. Paul Cartledge of Cambridge University calls "ritualized pederasty." Enforced homosexuality was part of the process whereby Spartan boys became "qualified" (as West so daintily put it) for service in the city-state's army.

 In his book The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, from Utopia to Crisis and Collapse, Dr. Cartledge observes that after a Spartan boy's seventh birthday "he was removed from the home environment, for good, to embark on the compulsory and communal educational system know as the Agoge or Raising/Upbrining. Between the ages of seven and eighteen the boys and youths were organized in `packs' and `herds' and placed under the supervision of young adult Spartans. They were encouraged to break the exclusive ties with their own natal families and to consider all Spartans of their father's age to be in loco parentis."

At the age of twelve, the Spartan male "was expected to receive a young adult warrior as his lover -- the technical Spartan term for the active senior partner was `inspirer,' while the junior partner was known as the `hearer,'" relates Dr. Cartledge. When the Spartan boy reached age eighteen he was evaluated for membership in the Crypteia, a police force assigned "to control the Helots" -- a population of civilian slaves who lived under a form of martial law and could be killed, with impunity, by the Spartan police.

If Barack Obama -- or even some tertiary bureaucratic appointee in his administration --were to invoke totalitarian Sparta as a model for an American social renaissance, Glenn Beck most likely would suffer a seizure at his chalkboard, and the entire warbot Right would go into convulsions. Allen West's candid endorsement of that vile totalitarian system, however, is seen as "courageous" and "principled" by that same social cohort.


"When was the last time you heard a politician speak like this?" squealed an enraptured conservative commentator regarding West's paean to Sparta's child-snatching militarist overlords.

Well, let's see:


There was that curious little fellow -- a bit eccentric, but a decorated combat veteran nonetheless -- who about eighty years ago explained: "When an opponent says, `I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, `Your child belongs to us already.... You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community." 


Fleshing out the Dear Leader's vision, his Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, insisted that the "primary obligation" of parents, schools, and other institutions was "to raise youth for service to the Volk and state...." 

Another version of that same sentiment was expressed at a Soviet Communist Party Education Workers' Conference in 1918: "We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."

A few years ago, the militarist Right worked itself into a spittle-flinging frenzy over a video depicting what was described as Obama's "paramilitary youth corps." The black teenagers in that video -- whose choreographed presentation did have the flavor of a ritual worshipping the Dear Leader of a third world nation -- were enrolled in a Kansas City program for troubled youngsters. This disagreeable episode was an entirely isolated incident.

Allen West, on the other hand, has candidly endorsed the idea that virtuous American mothers should "[give] up their male sons" to be raised by the State, for the State; that they should teach their sons that there is no vocation holier than killing on behalf of the State; and that there is no act nobler than sacrificing one's life in the State's service.  

Many of the same people who saw the odd little performance in Kansas City as evidence of a plot to create a monolithic, nation-wide Paramilitary Youth Corps of fearsome size and iron discipline apparently think this arrangement would be just fine, as long as Allen West were the one in charge.


Perhaps he's being coy, but Colonel West insists that he's not interested in a presidential run in 2012. If he's sincere in that refusal, he might find himself gravitating toward a different venture promoted by Beck -- what one of his publicists describes as a coterie of "former CEOs, CIA agents, and military personnel who share his vision to restore the republic." 

On the basis of prior performance, it's pretty clear that Beck's "vision" doesn't include a repudiation of the Warfare State. The thumbnail sketch of his proposed brain trust suggests that he would be communing with people who have been instrumental in building that vertically integrated enterprise of plunder, bloodshed, and misery, and have profited from it. 

I find myself wondering if Beck and his clique will gather in some sheltered Rocky Mountain redoubt to prepare for the final economic and social collapse -- and then emerge in the aftermath to offer the kind of leadership only seasoned militarists can provide. If this is the case, I'd suggest naming their sanctuary Galtieri Gulch, in memory of a CIA-supported figure whose junta field-tested many of the techniques -- military tribunals, kidnappings, torture, summary execution -- that are now routinely employed by Washington. 


Allen West would make a suitable figurehead for a post-collapse American military junta, and I suspect that among his admirers can be found many people who quietly long for the advent of an American Galtieri or Pinochet. I suppose it would be progress, of a sort, to see a black man considered for the role of the Man on the White Horse. 


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Dum spiro, pugno!

The War Party's Jihad in Oklahoma

A small but passionate segment of the population is sick with worry over the incalculably small possibility that Muslims may someday force their daughters to wear burqas, yet indifferent to the fact that those same daughters can't board a commercial flight without being virtually strip-searched or physically molested by a TSA functionary. Former Oklahoma state legislator Rex Duncan, recently elected District Attorney for Osage County, is the dutiful tribune of that myopic and misguided constituency.

Duncan is a polyester Pharisee, an embodiment of punitive populism. Like many contemporary "law and order" conservatives, Duncan holds forth at considerable length and with great passion about the evils of government power, except when it is exercised in its purest and most malignant form by way of the State's apparatus of regimentation and destruction. 

Duncan has consistently pressed to expand the reach and power of the domestic police state. His enthusiasm for the Warfare State was displayed a few years ago when he sponsored a measure creating a specialty state license plate memorializing the "Global War on Terrorism."



 Oklahoma ranks fourth among the states in the percentage of its male population behind bars, and leads the nation in imprisoning women. Each inmate costs Oklahoma taxpayers $22,000 a year. Reducing that population would do much to reduce the size, power, and expense of government. Yet as a state legislator, Duncan -- perhaps in anticipation of his new career as a prosecutor -- worked to expand the state's prison-industrial complex.

Hi -- I'm the Church Lady, and it's time for Church Chat!

In 2008, Duncan (who was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee) and like-minded colleagues submitted 73 bills either creating new felony offenses, or enhancing existing criminal offenses and their corresponding penalties. One amplification suggested by Duncan would have imposed the death penalty for repeat sex offenders.

Cheerfully anticipating a windfall for the "corrections industry," Duncan suggested that the state government throw some money at the good people who build and operate "private" prisons. He also sought to exploit the supposed immigration "crisis" to expand the odious practice of property forfeiture.


During Oklahoma's 2010 legislative session, Democratic Representative Mike Shelton proposed a measure to "crack down" on the sale of drug paraphernalia. To provide a tactile illustration of the supposed threat his legislation would address, Shelton bought a bagful of glass crack pipes at a local convenience store and attempted to hand them out to his colleagues. When approached by Shelton, Rep. Duncan refused even to touch such an accursed object.

"It's drug paraphernalia," Duncan sniffed, according to an eyewitness to the incident. "It's a misdemeanor that carries up to a year in county jail just to have one in your possession." 

Duncan appears to believe that possession of a Koran should likewise be seen as a criminal offense, or at least evidence of criminal intent. There is an element of irony here, given that Duncan's hyper-punitive and highly sectarian view of government authority isn't all that different from what one would expect from a medieval Mullah.


Three years ago, the Oklahoma Governor's Ethnic American Advisory Council attempted to give Duncan -- and every other state legislator -- a copy of the Koran embossed with the state seal as a gift commemorating the state's centennial. Duncan could have politely accepted the gift (publication of which was paid for by private funds), perhaps burying it wherever he keeps his unopened wedding presents. But this would have meant foregoing an opportunity for a public display of self-enraptured sanctimony.


"I object to the use of the state Centennial Seal and the state Seal all in an effort to further their religion," Duncan complained. He pointed out that he had gladly received a Centennial edition of the Bible presented to him by the Baptist General Convention in Oklahoma. "Mine is proudly on my desk on the Capitol and I don't think I ever read a part of it that condones the killing of women and children in furtherance of God's word," Duncan commented, apparently ignorant of the moral implications of that observation regarding the murderous foreign policy he and like-minded Religious Rightists endorse without qualification. 


Marjaneh Seirafi-Pour, chairwoman of the Advisory Council and a practicing Muslim, explained that handing out the Centennial-themed copies of the Koran was "a peaceful, thoughtful project [intended]to introduce ourselves to leaders." It's difficult to escape the impression that Duncan is offended not by anything Seirafi-Pour and her fellow Muslims have done, but rather by their simple existence -- or, at very least, their perverse insistence on being treated as law-abiding individual citizens of Oklahoma, rather than part of an undifferentiated mass of menace. 


Duncan's most notable accomplishment as state legislator was his central role in composing Ballot Question 755, which would amend the state constitution to forbid courts from considering or using international law" or "considering or using Sharia Law." Duncan and his colleagues grandly entitled the measure the "Save our State" amendment. 

According to Duncan, Question 755 was a "preemptive strike" against an effort to impose Sharia Law. Professor Joseph Thai of the University of Oklahoma's College of Law described it as "an answer in search of a problem." However one characterizes the measure, it was approved by 70% of those who cast a ballot in Oklahoma's mid-term election.

Two days later, the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a complaint on behalf of Oklahoma resident Muneer Awad, seeking a restraining order against implementation of the amendment. Federal District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange granted a temporary restraining order, opining that the amendment amounts to a constitutionally impermissible burden on those who adhere to one particular religious tradition. 


Awad, who directs CAIR's Oklahoma branch, insists that the purpose of his lawsuit is to
"show our fellow Oklahomans that Muslims are their neighbors and that we are committed to upholding the U.S. Constitution and promoting the benefits of a pluralistic society." Duncan maintains that such conciliatory talk is mere persiflage intended to give cover to the ongoing "hideous invasion" of the Sooner State by the Mohammedan Horde.

As is the case with several other states, Oklahoma has seen an increase in Muslim immigration in recent years, much of it composed of refugees from countries that have been on the receiving end of Washington's armed benevolence. If he were sincerely concerned about stopping that "invasion" of Oklahoma Duncan would be agitating for an end to the military meddling that helps generate it.

Like many others who share his worldview, Rex Duncan eagerly supported George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, in which U.S. military personnel -- most of whom were Christian, many of whom were Jews -- were used to install Sharia Law at gunpoint. This is leading to the religious cleansing of Iraq's Christian population, many of whom are part of congregations with roots going back to the apostolic era. 


As Syrian Catholic Archbishop Athanase Matti Shaba Matoka of Baghdad pointed out in an October 15 address, Iraq is the land where Abraham was born, where many of the events chronicled in the Old Testament took place. Christians in that land have endured persecution and great periods of suffering -- the "last being the American occupation." Since the "liberation" of Iraq in 2003, hundreds of thousands of Christians have been killed, terrorized, or driven from their homes.


"The invasion of Iraq by America and its allies brought to Iraq in general, and especially to its Christians, destruction and ruin on all levels," lamented the Archbishop. "Churches were blown up, bishops and priests and lay persons were massacred, many were the victims of aggression. Doctors and businessmen were kidnapped, others were threatened, storage places and homes were pillaged."

"Seven years have passed and Christianity is still bleeding," he continued. "Where is the world conscience? All the world remains a spectator before what is happening in Iraq, especially with regards to Christians.... We ask the question of the great powers: is it true what is said that there is a plan to empty the Middle East of Christians and that Iraq is one of the victims?"

This is authentic persecution -- not the cartoonish fantasies that clutter the adolescent minds of comfortable, self-satisfied Babbitts like Rex Duncan. Oh, how such people are titillated by the fantasy of standing in the gap like Horatius at the bridge, gallantly defending hearth, home, and feminine virtue from savagely bearded heathens! 

Luxuriating in their suburban mega-church madrassas, invincibly certain of their collective righteousness, they can often be heard chanting praises to the Regime's military arm as it visits death and misery on innocent people on the other side of the globe -- including people whose faith they supposedly share.

Duncan's "Save our State" amendment wasn't written to address a legitimate threat; it is a form of political pornography that will almost certainly find an audience elsewhere, where we can find people peddling even grimier versions of the same product. Among the purveyors of such prurient fare can be found the Rev. Elijah Abraham. 

A native of Iraq who converted from Islam to Christianity and now runs an organization called Veterans Against Jihadism, Abraham supports aggressive war against Muslims abroad and suppression of the individual rights of Muslims domestically.

In a recent interview with The New American magazine, Rev. Abraham was asked: “How should Americans view the mosques that are springing up all over our country?”

“When you look at a mosque … please don’t look at it as you would look at a church or a synagogue or Buddhist temple," he replied, since a mosque can also serve as "a base of political operations" and also "a storage place for weapons.”

“Would you contend that most mosques in the United States are also serving as weapons repositories?” the interviewer asked Abraham, to which the Reverend offered an eager and emphatic affirmative reply:

“Sure! Now, are there any weapons right now if I go to the mosque down the street? Do they have them? Maybe, maybe not. But that does not mean they would not have them.”

Apparently, American Muslims have the burden of proving that they are not secretly stockpiling weapons in anticipation of waging a war of extermination against the infidels. Just to be safe, preemptive action of some kind might be necessary. On that subject, Rev. Abraham endorses a course of action much more assertive than Rex Duncan's legislative "preemptive strike":

“The best example I could give you is from the battle for Fallujah in April 2004 when the Marines went into a mosque and killed everyone in the mosque. The liberal media and the Muslim community in the West cried out…. If those are honest worshipers, what are they doing with bazookas and other weapons?”

The answer to that question, which should be obvious to any honest observer, is this: Those people were exercising their God-given right to defend their homes, families, and places of worship against criminal aggression by a foreign army that occupied their country without legal or moral authority of any kind. 

That right inheres in every human being. If we assume that individual Muslims are people, we have to recognize that each of them has the right to armed self-defense.  It would be interesting to learn if Duncan recognizes the right of a Muslim to self-defense. His actions are highly suggestive of his likely answer.


Three years ago, when he rejected the gift of a Koran from fellow Oklahoma residents, Duncan unctuously proclaimed that "most Oklahomans do not endorse the idea of killing innocent women and children in the name of ideology." The planted axiom in the ideology to which he and those of his ilk subscribe is that no Muslim -- of any age or station in life -- can truly be considered "innocent." You do the math.

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Dum spiro, pugno!